The Dog Stars
by That-Hoopy-Frood
Summary: Beneath every story, there is another story. There is a hand within the hand. There is the Truth within the Truth. It is a story of a team –– Falman, Fuery, Breda, Havoc, Hughes, Hawkeye, Mustang –– and their struggles with friendship, and hope, and survival, and pain. And, always, a man... an alchemist doomed to wander the dark causeways of the universe...
1. Jupiter -- Tin

_|| "… Jupiter represents education, wisdom, wealth, and knowledge…" ||_

Vato Falman

* * *

 **December 21st, 1914**

* * *

If there was, indeed, a Supreme Being, and if, indeed, Vato Falman met his end in the very near future –– which was looking more and more likely with each passing day –– then the Second Lieutenant decided that the first thing he was going to do in the Hereafter was apologize to Him –– or Her, or It, or Them –– profusely, reverently, in all four languages he spoke.

Because although Falman did not know what, exactly, he'd done to warrant his exile at Fort Briggs, he knew in his heart of hearts it must have been an act truly abhorrent.

Did he accidentally tread on Black Hayate's tail? Was _he_ the one who gave Kain salmonella during the infamous Grumman potluck dinner of 1912? Good lord, did he _file_ something incorrectly?

Jean Havoc had been in the habit of nattering on about bad "karma" wherever his abysmal dating life was concerned; besides the fact that people consistently found Jean's flirtations distinctly unpalatable, Falman had dismissed the superstitions out of hand as psuedo-scientific nonsense.

Now, as he crouched in his bunk, shivering, his teeth chattering, the slitted window freezing against his cheek, Vato wasn't so sure.

The only redeeming factor of the entire rotten situation, he supposed, was the view.

Fort Briggs rested between two upward slopes of folded granite –– through Vato's window, tendrils of iridescent cloud crept over the white-fanged mountains, which rose starkly, enormously, across Falman's line of sight. The cliffs and crevasses each held an authority that made their solid, separate impressions in his mind –– each one with their own unduplicated shape. The wastes of snow were ghostly under the moon. The sky was dark –– an oily midnight blue, the stars piercingly bright. If Falman looked past the ramparts of the Fort, he could distinguish the furtherest ranges, the Drachman peaks, pellucid under the moon, row after row of them. Endless columns glimmering in their silvery livery.

Absently, Vato held a small, blue book, one of his only personal effects, up to the window... the title's reflective typeface glinted in the moonlight, as though the words were pressed chrome. The book was shabby and quite literally falling apart at the seams, the pages yellow with age and curling from damp. Strings tentacled from both ends of the spine. The image embossed on the cover was faded and faint.

Bereft of anything better to do and wary of more maudlin thoughts lurking in the back of his mind, Vato opened the book to the first page. He began to read in a low, fumbling murmur...

"One day in the long ago, Tāima," recited Vato, "and her twin sister, Tuarangi, were laying on the grass outside the kōihi on a warm summer evening. They were looking up into the sky, describing star-pictures formed by their imaginations. Tāima said to Tuarangi, _My eyes are dazzled by all the stars in outer space_. For that is where your name comes from, Tuarangi. The love that moves the moon and all the stars..."

On the page was a picture of the waning moon, hanging like a hunter's horn high over the sisters' heads. The stars, rendered in ink dots, resembled sacred geometry in their convolutions of filigree work, but with such a luxury of forms that of a hundred constellations which at first appeared exactly the same, no two seemed alike upon a closer examination.

Falman flipped the page.

"Tuarangi asked Tāima, _With what star would you like to play, my sister, the blue one or the red one?_ The other girl answered, _I'd like to play with the red star._

" _Oh, that suits me well,_ said Tuarangi, _I would like to play with the blue star. She is younger, and fairer, and full of laughter; the red is the older, and too tired to play._ "

Vato sighed, closing the book.

It had been a goodbye gift from Sciezka. Falman wasn't entirely sure _why_ the girl had given him a children's book as a going-away present, but her generosity had been so genuine and her insistence, so earnest, that the newly-promoted Second Lieutenant hadn't been able to find it within himself to refuse her.

Vato rested his head against the cool, smooth surface of the wall. In the moonlight, the rock shadows on the snow were sharp. Vato couldn't help but think there was something of a common miracle in the tension between light and dark, something the alchemists probably had a name for, but Falman, for all his knowledge, did not.

The unforgiving brutality of the mountain bound them together, the Major-General's Bears, and after many paths and many years, perhaps many deaths, too, they became aware of a certain sacredness in their suffering. It was all very dignified and noble, Falman supposed, if one were inclined to admire that sort of fool thing.

Needless to say, the arrangement was not to Vato Falman's fancy. Survival of the fittest was all very well and good for wild animals, Briggsmen, or particularly strict political theorists, but the Second Lieutenant preferred not to scrape and claw his way through life if he could best avoid it. His was a constitution made for humbler, more ordinary ventures... organizing case files, perhaps. Or stapling things.

As Vato sat –– torso bent almost horizontal, elbows balanced on his knees, and thumbs holding up the weight of his head –– he lamented that fate, fortuity, and Führer Bradley had denied him any say in the matter.

And it wasn't as though the stars were likely to spell better fortune anytime in the near future. A wave of saudade swept over Vato, and those maudlin thoughts he'd fought so hard to dam came flooding back, washing against the inside of his skull.

He could pinpoint the exact moment his luck had taken a turn from appalling to apocalyptic... as on many, _many_ former occasions, the arrival of the Elric Brothers had been a portent of trouble. It wasn't enough they made Falman guilty by association when that behemoth Homunculus showed up, oh no... then he'd been manhandled into the underground for four hours and forced to cough up every scrap of information to Major General Armstrong under the threat of a court martial! A court martial! _Him!_

Then Edward had had Vato list the dates and locations of all major military skirmishes in Amestris's history, beginning with the Riviere incident of 1558 and ending with the recent Reole riots. The map points formed the nodes of a pentamerismic array identical to the Philosopher's Stone transmutation circle Edward and Lieutenant Ross had unearthed in Laboratory 5, soon before its demolition.

It had not taken a major cognitive leap on Edward's part to suggest that the nation of Amestris had been created by the Homunculi, for the sole purpose of acquiring enough land and lives to form a Nationwide Transmutation Circle.

Not longer after, General Raven showed up... the Elrics were tossed in the brig... and Armstrong's arm was twisted until she agreed to put Sloth back into its hole and shore-up the entrance.

All in all, it had not been the most auspicious of starts at Vato Falman's new station.

He supposed he ought to count himself at least somewhat fortunate: Vato had very nearly landed himself in a cell right alongside the Elric Brothers. Buccaneer had insisted that Falman's prior dealing with Edward and Alphonse equated to guilt –– it didn't –– but the Captain mitigated his harsh intentions after he reasoned that standing for hours in the bitter cold scraping icicles off the pipes was punishment enough –– it was.

And in any case, thought Falman gloomily, sitting on his hands in order to warm them, the prospect of a transmutation circle the size of an entire country tended to put most other problems into fresh perspective.

It wasn't as though things could get much worse.

"Lieutenant Falman!" came a booming voice from outside the dormitory door. "You're needed by Major Miles! On the double!"

Then again, Vato had been wrong before.

"C-coming sir!" Falman didn't waste his breath mentioning the fact that he was, technically, off-duty. Somehow, he doubted it would make a damn bit of difference, and the last thing he wanted was one of the senior staff marching down to the barracks and dragging him through the Fort by his earlobe.

Evidently, the Major-General was known to do that sort of thing. Rumor was the latest victim had nearly lost the ear.

Vato was not a fanciful person –– he was sensible, rational, his actions chosen in accordance with logic and prudence. But where Major-General Olivier Mira Armstrong was concerned, Falman found he was more than willing to give hyperbole the benefit of the doubt.

The summoning officer had marched on by the time Falman buttoned his coat and laced his boots. The long, gunmetal-gray corridor was largely empty. The brutally spartan walls were freezing to the touch. The air had a crisp, clean fragrance... not sterile. Just empty, unusual in a military installation, but then again, most military installations didn't need to recycle air through dozens of floors and hundreds of square feet-worth of research and development laboratories. Fort Briggs really was an incredible feat of engineering, though Vato suspected he would find his admiration infinitely more forthcoming from a more _objective_ perspective... hundreds of miles away, perhaps, back home in Central City.

He found the Major standing at the junction of the communications center, his arms crossed, head cocked towards the open doorway. Falman studied Miles's face for some tell, but his ever-present snowblind glasses masked whatever thoughts lay hidden behind his eyes. Miles cut a powerful figure, like so many of the Briggsmen. He was tall and lean but solid, with a ruggedly handsome face framed by a thick crop of snow-white hair, trimmed to two razor-sharp sideburns and pulled back into a severe tail. His mouth pursed as he glowered at Vato, who stood to attention.

"Lieutenant Falman, reporting sir."

"Lieutenant, take over for me here."

Falman's bladed hand faltered at his forehead. "Sir?"

"I've been summoned to the Major-General's ready room, and my charge cannot be left alone in the meanwhile. Since most of the other men are on patrol or shoring up the hole in the engineering section, I expect you to look after him."

Major Miles frowned with a solemnity to suggest the arrangement was not up for discussion. Vato's lips parted to release a small sigh; he had hoped that some of his unease would escape with it. "Sir, forgive me... who exactly––"

But the Major was already halfway down the corridor. "He ought to be finishing up his conversation," called Miles, over his shoulder. If Falman didn't know any better, he'd say the officer sounded distinctly short on patience. "Keep an eye on him, Lieutenant, and don't let him wander."

Let _who_ wander? thought Falman furiously. Wetting a suddenly dry mouth, he padded around the corner and regarded the row of phone booths.

The illumination in the communications center changed subtly, as though the light were glancing off a bright surface, the color of snow. Vato craned his neck and saw someone standing in one of the middle booths, a man dressed in an immaculately tailored-suit, bone-white save for the violet necktie. The individual talked lowly, quietly, his head bent low to receiver, but straightening as his conversation dragged on. A slow, sedate unfolding.

Vato was struck with a sudden sense of wrongness, of fraught, almost atavistic unease, like long nails scraping the surface of his scalp, raising the hackles of his soul. He felt as though he had stumbled across a forgotten god or a sleeping devil, a creature without name from the days before the world settled down and declared itself sane.

Even at a distance, and even though his words were hardly more than a whisper, Major Miles's charge had a voice like the cracking of ice on a winter lake, a bone-rattling, reverberant snap. There was something soft and slight and slenderly surreal about him. Heymans had always been the one to talk about art and poetry and the like, most of it flying well over Vato's sensible head, but looking at the white-suited man, Falman understood in an instant why sculptors were so often challenged to attempt effete thinkers and philosophers on white marble plinths, and why they so seldom succeeded. Vato suspected the undertaking must regularly exceed the scope of the base and the reach of the chisel –– the implausibility of rendering kinetics within stillness, motion within rest.

Madness within composure.

Major Solf J. Kimblee, the Crimson Alchemist, reminded Vato of a particularly languid, self-possessed cat. Falman was fond of cats as a matter of principle, and he lamented Kimblee having soured the affection, perhaps irreversibly. Like a cat, he was long-limbed and limber, with a finely-boned face and an inquisitive glint in his gaze that suggested he knew more than he let on. In his white suit, with his dark hair pulled back into a tail, he presented a slim, sleek figure. But for all his refinement, there was something of the string-bean scrappers Vato remembered from the dingy alleys around his childhood home, as well –– the dangerous set of his jaw, the tightness of his brow as he considered the telephone at his ear. Falman couldn't determine with absolute certainty what color Kimblee's eyes were. They were wet and dark and shining, a purple-hued blue, like pools of still salt water. Deep enough to drown in.

He moved the telephone to the other ear, and Vato watched the mesmerizing ripple of muscle and tendon on the backs of his hands as he turned his palms up, flashing briefly an indigo transmutation circle.

Falman gulped.

Vato knew Kimblee well enough by reputation, of course. Possessed of an eidetic memory and, more often than not, ample opportunity to peruse the military case files at his leisure, Vato could hardly fail to remember the infamous ill-esteem the Crimson's Alchemist had cultivated during his military tenure –– insofar as the official word was concerned, Kimblee had been imprisoned in Central City after the détente of the Ishvalan Civil War for having turned his combustion-based combat alchemy on his own superior officers. Colonel Mustang had spoken of the incident sparingly. Lieutenant Hawkeye had not mentioned it at all. It had taken Falman's reorganization of the court martial office's case files to bring the true extent of Solf Kimblee's violence and madness to light.

Falman frowned; the Crimson Alchemist had not yet taken notice of the Second Lieutenant's presence, engrossed in his conversation. It was all ostensibly ordinary. According to word on the grape vine, Kimblee had sustained severe injuries on the journey to North City. The former State Alchemist had been placed in charge of apprehending a dangerous fugitive –– the same fugitive Colonel Mustang had failed to capture back in East City. It made sense for the man to be making frequent phone-calls, coordinating his search efforts with his constituents and keeping his superiors updated on the status of his health. All very routine...

And it was that _normality_ that aroused in Falman a queasy gut feeling, communicated the vaguest sense of something being the matter. Vato Falman was not by nature a suspicious person, but after a month's worth of surprise transfers, homunculi, and Nationwide Transmutation Circles, fair-mindedness was a luxury he could no longer afford himself. Cynicism was so contagious.

Slinking towards the row of call stations, Falman avoided Kimblee's eye, the Second Lieutenant's heart hammering so wildly against the confines of his chest that he feared he might pass out. He made a beeline for one of the phones. He recalled in an instant a conversation he'd had with Kain Fuery some years previously, during an undercover mission at Eastern Polytechnic. In older ringer telephones, it was possible to eavesdrop on other conversations in the room... since the ringer mechanism consisted of a magnet, a coil, and a hammer, and being as the coil was hooked directly to the phone line, the coil and hammer could be used as a microphone. When someone in the room talked, the hammer vibrated, inducing a current in the coil. Probably not high fidelity, figured Falman, but if he slunk into one of the adjacent booths and lifted the headset, he might be able to listen in...

"You're not Major Miles."

Falman near about leapt out of his skin. He slammed the phone receiver back on its cradle and bit his tongue to keep his surprise from leaving his mouth as a squeal.

Kimblee had his arms crossed over the top of one of the dividers, his chin resting on his folded hands, two thin strands of hair falling over his eyes. He gazed at Falman with his terrifying, enigmatic eyes, their abominable and delusive charm, and grinned, toothy and open-mouthed. Vato swallowed again, the motion moving against a stone in the pit of his throat, but the prickles tidaling along his shoulders did not subside.

Kimblee turned his head to one side and swept one palm in a wide arc. "You mustn't let me interrupt your call. Please..."

"I..." Vato fought for some stone-faced inscrutability when, even at the best of times, there wasn't much to be found. But he could hardly admit that he'd been intending to eavesdrop on the Crimson Alchemist's phone-call, so Falman improvised: "I... forgot the number."

"Indeed?"

"Yes. Happens to everyone, I suppose, sir. I'll call again later."

The corner of Kimblee's mouth pulled skyward in a sneer. "I take it you're to be my new minder, then."

"Major Miles was indisposed, sir."

Rising from the phone booth, Kimblee propelled himself towards Falman, contorting his face into a kind of macabre grimace which Vato supposed was the closest the Alchemist could manage to a smile. "Evidently." He strolled along the hallway and, throwing Falman a deliberate glance, let his hand hinge out and fiddle with one of the free receivers with exaggerated movements, a performance which worked to underline his awareness of Vato's previous actions. Satisfied his cruel mimicry had made his point, Kimblee queried affably: "Was there something you wanted of me, Second Lieutenant Falman?"

Falman thought he had recovered his composure –– somewhat –– but Kimblee's question threatened to disassemble the facade all over again. Kimblee knew Vato's name... Falman could safely assume the man also knew his station, his military history, the contents of his personnel file... his eidetic memory...

It occurred to Vato, then, that Kimblee was well aware of Falman's lie concerning the phone number. Though he had suspected as much, Falman's fear flared at the utter potency of Kimblee's intuition, so much so that his mind, for a time, could not form a coherent response.

Kimblee, however, appeared not to notice Vato's agitation. "What's that you have there, Lieutenant?"

Kimblee's intense and velvety gaze fastened itself to Falman's hands –– the fixation was so adhesive, so corrosive, that an irrational part of Vato worried that if the Crimson Alchemist were to withdraw, he would tear the Second Lieutenant's skin away. Vato followed the other man's line of sight...

And found, to his astonishment, that he was still carrying the blue children's book.

Distracted by Major Miles's summons and unsettled by Kimblee's poisonous charisma, Falman had forgotten to leave the book in the dormitories. He remembered, abruptly, how often Colonel Mustang would lament Vato's absent-mindedness, his tendency to live distracted, rarely fully present.

There was a strange paradox to it, Falman supposed. His rational, logical mind was invariably concomitant with his propensity for disappearing inside his own head. He was not proud of his tendency to favor realism –– it was like being proud of lacking in imagination. But for Falman, realism and imagination were natural accompaniments, subsumed into his photographic memory. His powers of recall stretched unbroken from childhood up to the present, held together by new connections, in a complex and ingenious pattern in which every phenomenon he saw was capable of evoking a memory.

"May I?" queried Kimblee, inclining his head towards the book, straightening his arm in a curiously unassuming gesture –– in full defiance of the array inked in indigo on his palm.

Perplexed, but damned if he was going to raise a point of protest, Vato silently and demurely handed the Crimson Alchemist the story.

Propping the book on the crook of his arm, with his free hand Kimblee turned back the worn cover. For a few moments, the fluttering of the thin paper was the only sound, continuing on and on until finally his hand came to rest on a random page... flickering with backlight, the print on both sides visible, the intricate nodes of constellations like cinders blown thin across the dry, curling paper.

Kimblee read aloud: "'The sisters fell asleep. When they woke, they found themselves in another world... the twelfth heaven, _te toi o ngā rangi_. There were four of them there, Tuarangi and Tāima and the two stars who had become girls. The blue star was very, very old and was gray-headed, while the younger, the red star, was red-headed. The sisters stayed a long time in this star world, and Tuarangi, who had chosen the blue star, was very sorry, for she was so old.'"

The texture of the Crimson Alchemist's voice was so plush, so deep and dulcet, that it became easy to overlook how much power and control he wielded masterfully through his words. Therein lay the danger, Vato supposed.

Major Kimblee blinked his violet eyes slowly, like a goanna lizard. Hair wisps threw shadow splinters across his face. His face took on a scowling, deeply troubled expression. Vato noticed for the first time a peculiar smell rising from the Alchemist... the earthy scent of rain on dirt, but also the electric, restless roiling of ozone.

No breath, no sound, except at times the muffled grinding of teeth, disturbed the sudden solitude that surrounded Kimblee. It seemed to Falman as though the Crimson Alchemist had forgotten the Second Lieutenant's presence entirely, fixated as he was on the book. A kind of slow gyration swept the light behind his eyes, his thoughts turning turbid and muddy in his ardent contemplation.

Curiously, Vato saw something of Heymans Breda in Kimblee's reverie, an almost monastic rumination. Both men possessed the faculty of seeing phenomena in the detached finality of each separate instant, in perfectly distinct outlines and anatomies. Kimblee and Breda both seemed atuned to the odd synchronicities that traced the way disparate details veered to touch one another, change direction, and then come close until they connected and circumstance rendered their correspondence significant. Though that significance heretofore escaped Falman's own recknoning, he didn't doubt that Kimblee intuited something from the book... though what intrigue a children's story held for a man of his intelligence –– and, admittedly, his psychoses –– Vato couldn't say. Nor was he entirely sure he wanted to know...

"Lieutenant Falman," said Kimblee suddenly, gaze bolting Falman to the floor. "Define the word _chrysopoeia_ , if you would be so kind."

"It... it refers to the transmutation of common metals into gold, sir."

"Top marks, Lieutenant. And when was the alembic invented?"

"The Third Century."

"And who wrote _De Materia Medica_?"

"Dioscorides, sir."

"Then tell me... according to Dioscorides's work, how does one produce an emetic syrup from troches of alhandal?"

Falman screwed up his eyes and racked the recesses of his memory. He found, to his dismay, that he had never actually _read_ Dioscorides, and though he remembered the filing information from the Main Branch of the Central Library, the contents of the medical text remained stubbornly elusive. "I... I don't know, sir."

Kimblee's mouth pursed in a bloodless line, his eyes holding Falman pinioned where he stood, before querying: "How would one go about collecting condensed mercury using an alembic still?"

"I don't know, sir."

"Translate _ἕν τὸ πᾶν_."

Vato Falman spoke four languages fluently. Ancient Xerxian was not one of them.

"I... can't, sir."

Staring at Vato with impenetrable purple-blue eyes, Kimblee studied him, not moving, not speaking. Falman's courage disintegrated, and a violent tremor swept up the length of him. Kimblee took note of the shudder, as well as the humiliation that scorched Vato's cheeks.

There hovered in the air a charged expectancy, turbulent, tingling along Falman's nerve endings.

"A pity," said Kimblee softly. "I find I'm almost disappointed."

"I... I am no alchemist, sir."

Falman imagined his crestfallen expression must have been quite comical, for Kimblee threw back his head and laughed: a hard, spiteful cackle which stoked a resentful shame in Vato. He was almost grateful for it. It overcame the fear and indignity.

"I will grant you this, Lieutenant: you have a truly prodigious handle on the understatement."

The Crimson Alchemist, in the meanwhile, began to turn the book between his hands, the embossed title glinting in the Fort's harsh industral lighting. There was a horrible, erratic thumping in Falman's chest, as though a large bird was trapped inside his ribcage and beating itself to death.

"Forgive my asking, Major..." he mouthed, the words tailing off, his voice little more than a murmur.

Kimblee's expression softened; he looked almost charmed. "I no longer hold that rank, Lieutenant. My title or my honorific –– or my name, if you're so inclined –– will suffice."

Falman's gulp tugged uncomfortably at his Adam's apple. "What... what interest do you have in a children's story?"

He smirked. "Even I was a child once, Lieutenant Falman."

Reminiscence, then? wondered Vato. Had Kimblee read the same book as a boy? Somehow, a wistful affection for the past ran counter to the Crimson Alchemist's indomitable fixations on the present moment. Falman must have communicated something of his doubt with his expression, for the Major –– _former_ Major –– bobbed his shoulders in a philosophical shrug.

"Writers, as a species, interest me," confessed Kimblee. "A strange race of people who feel half-cheated of an experience unless it is retold. As though it does not really exist until it is put into words. This book, and others, constitute a paradox: the more unreal an experience becomes –– translated from real action into unreal words, dead symbols for life itself –– the more vivid it grows." Mired in contemplation, Kimblee fingered the straw-like strings bursting from the spine of the book. "Their stories are hinged to forgetfulness, like doors."

Of course, realized Falman... Kimblee had an eidetic memory, too.

Like him.

The Crimson Alchemist was a man interested in the exact recall of what was said, who said it, to whom. He wanted to know the truth, undistorted by time and revision and wishes and regrets. And true stories couldn't be told forward, only backward.

Then why not cast the book aside? thought Falman. Why did Kimblee continue to clutch it, to level on it with cold eyes?

"I remember it all, Lieutenant: every word, every breath, every tick of the clock… everything that has ever happened to me is with me forever. I can never forget it… just as you cannot.

It was unnatural... how easily Kimblee read Vato's mind, as though Falman were projecting his thoughts as brazenly as the stars and bars on his epaulettes.

"But if the mere act of bringing facts to mind and rote memorization constitute the scope of your cognitive powers," continued Kimblee, his smirk lengthening to a scowl, eyeing the Second Lieutenant with something not dissimilar to disdain, but with a contempt too mild to suggest Falman was worthy of Kimblee's opinion of him, good or bad; "then the memories are no more real than a children's fairytale. Stories simplify, solidify, codify… mummify. An oft-told story is like a dried-up daisy chain pressed into the family album at the back of a drawer; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

"Your powers of recall, Lieutenant..." murmured Kimblee, Falman shuddering slightly, and the Alchemist with the strange smile upon his face. "They are dead things."

But if not for his memory, thought Falman, then what good was he?

What _use?_

The hollowness in Vato's chest, the tense yearning for some purpose and significance, the loneliness he braced against and lingered until he could immerse himself in work and forget... it returned with a vengeance. Not despair. Something else, something with a power that endured. Not despair, but a _memory_ of despair.

How ironic.

Falman had to keep busy; he had to keep moving so his optic nerves did not slip loose and spin his eyes to the interior of his skull, where the memories waited for him.

It took Vato a moment more than it ought to have done for him to realize that Kimblee was holding the book out to him, cover up. Falman, not looking the Crimson Alchemist in the eye, took the story back.

"Be glad you're not just a character scrawled in the margins of somebody else's storybook, Vato Falman," said Kimblee, lip curling. "You'd be frightfully dull."

And then the Crimson Alchemist ignored Falman completely.

He rested against the wall, one foot braced adjacent to the knee of the opposite leg, arms crossed. Content to keep his own company until Major Miles's return.

Vato wanted to be angry... angry to be so disregarded, cast aside. For a few long moments, he struggled in his mind with all kinds of defenses. He wanted to say something to counteract Kimblee's callousness, to expiate his anger and to justify himself in the eyes of the Alchemist Concurrently, Falman grappled with rationalizing precisely _why_ he felt the need to give Kimblee grounds for his own validity. The Crimson Alchemist's free, unfettered philosophizing, his cruel caprice, dismissed Falman's character and demanded Falman's self-advocacy in equal measure.

The man was right: it was a paradox. Kimblee was like the storybook –– if what he said was true, and the retroactive nature of memory meant everyone perceived a different reality based on their histories, their needs and desires, then whose reality was accurate?

It was all a contrivance. It was a projection of what each person perceived and believed at any given moment.

What did Kimblee believe? wondered Falman. What truth did he find in a children's storybook that Vato could not see?

Kimblee's possession of an innate proclivity towards indifference, towards deliberate denial of mercy, towards disengaging all that was moral within himself... whatever the Crimson Alchemist saw with those eyes, the Second Lieutenant knew it was something he was blind to.

A vision Vato would never share.

Falman's nose grew very red at the tip; his mouth screwed itself by his left ear; gradually, his thin face wrinkled until it resembled a withered crabapple.

And finally, if one listened intently and watched closely, one could hear small sniffs and see two drops of water issue from his pinched eyes...


	2. Mercury -- Quicksilver

_|| "… Mercury represents the principles of communication, rationality, and reasoning..." ||_

Kain Fuery

* * *

 **September 30th, 1910**

* * *

The day was brisk and gray and the wind carried the taste of burning, like smoked salmon. The clouds scuttled across the sky, and the sun broke out in bursts. Lacy veils of rain threaded over the distant hills. The city shimmered on the wet pavement, and passing faces looked spectral white in the sway of shine and shadow. September was ending, and a young sergeant named Kain Fuery watched as his breath fogged and rose above him. He was ill-accustomed to the cold, and wished for a warmer coat.

"Thank you for showing me around East City, Warrant Officer," said Kain, quiet and gentle, looking up at his companion through his spectacles. "I really appreciate it, sir."

Vato Falman was tall, stooped, slim and silvery... much like the chilly autumn hanging over East City. He wore a wooly sweater that made his chest look stocky but his head small. His gray eyes –– pinched in a perpetual squint –– met Kain's, and the small sergeant had the unsettling sensation of being weighed up and found distinctly wanting. A pulse began to beat in his temple, and he adjusted his spectacles on the bridge of his nose for want of something to keep his hands occupied.

"It's no worry," said the Warrant Officer without consequence, leaving a nervous Fuery to take deep, steadying breaths. "And... you may call me Falman, if you so wish it, when we are off-duty. All the others do."

"Oh. Well, all right, s–– Falman."

They passed a cafe on the corner, with whitewashed clapboard walls and a green tin roof, yellow awnings fanning over the pavement, woodwork lattices entwined with purple wisteria with their petals turned towards the diners, eavesdropping on the conversations. Lost in his thoughts, and sensing Falman's discomfort at prolonging conversation longer than was absolutely necessary, Kain looked out at the tenebristic smear of that last day of September. Opposite him, across the street, was the bridge of the main thoroughfare of East City; beneath its arches ran the gray, ribboning waters of the East River, flowing thick and turbid after the rainfall like some strange cincture which sparkled in the light of the small, white sun.

"You're not from around here originally, are you, Sergeant?"

"Fuery, sir, or Kain," he offered in what he hoped was a conciliatory gesture. "And no… I'm from Dublith."

"What is your impression of East City, if I may ask?"

Something about the stilted, stiff manner of Falman's asking communicated to Kain an unspoken objective beyond the query. The Warrant Officer could affect a bearing relaxed and unconcerned with only marginal success. It was his face, decided Kain: pointy and sharp and interrogative. It was difficult to act the sparrow when a man looked more like a woodpecker, especially one with a stubborn pine knot to hammer.

"It's colder than I anticipated, sir," admitted Kain. "The weather is more temperate further south. Since East City is so close to Ishval and the Great Desert, I expected it to be... sunnier."

"Perhaps it would be prudent of us to stop by a tailor for a warmer coat?"

"I haven't received this month's paycheck yet, sir."

"Ah."

They fell back into a hesitant silence –– Kain sensed more questions brimming under the surface of Falman's tranquil and even-tempered exterior. But more than an hour of covering for his natural awkwardness and aversion to mindless jibber-jabber had drained Falman of any effort in masking the ulterior motives to his queries. So the Warrant Officer didn't look at Kain and Kain didn't look at him. Some questions, Fuery knew, were so loaded that the only way to ask them was... sideways, he supposed.

And at the heart of it, Kain suspected, was a single concept of cross-examination. Fuery was the consummate newcomer in Lieutenant-Colonel Roy Mustang's curiously tight-knit little division. All Kain had to do was look behind the mirror of Falman's placid features to infer the true purpose of their outing together: interrogation. The Lieutenant-Colonel wanted to learn more about Kain and Kain's opinions of his new station, so Mustang decided to dress the questioning up in Falman's self-effacing small talk. While the freedom and safety of an off-duty stroll added a different complexion to the matter, Kain still believed that he ought to be frank in answering the questions. Though he was not, strictly speaking, on the clock, he was still a soldier, and he had an obligation, based on very reasonable expectation, to make a full disclosure.

In any case, Kain had anticipated something like this happening –– it made sense for any competent commander to know who, exactly, he was working with. And if the rumors were worth their salt, then _competent_ sold Roy Mustang short.

And Fuery would be fibbing if he didn't admit the converse was true, as well: he wanted to learn more about Roy Mustang's team as earnestly as they wanted to learn about him. So... he consigned himself to humoring Falman. The Warrant Officer was entitled to the information, after all.

"The Lieutenant-Colonel eats lunch here on occasion," mentioned Vato innocuously, nodding in the direction of the clapboard cafe. "French roast coffee, two sugars, no cream, and a caramelized garlic, spinach, and cheddar quiche."

"That's awfully specific, sir."

"He's a person of particulars."

In the corner of Kain's eye, he saw a man running across the bridge. He was a silhouette, cast black against the gray of the sky. He looked the way the world looked without Kain's glasses. Vaguely hued, indistinct. A body underwater, lost in the blur of bubble and wave. Fuery tore his gaze away as Falman continued to burble…

"He doesn't like the mess at Eastern Command very much. He usually has Lieutenant Hawkeye bring him something from town, and she delegates the responsibility to the lowest-ranking officer." Falman considered. "Which, I suppose, falls to you, now."

"French roast coffee, two sugars, no cream, and a caramelized garlic, spinach, and cheddar quiche," recited Fuery. "Got it."

Falman shook his head, but smiled at Kain regardless. "Of course," he added, "you will never know when he might change his mind. Recently, I don't think he knows, either. So it goes," he added.

"I thought you said the Lieutenant-Colonel was a person of particulars?"

"Particular and persnickety are not mutually exclusive where our commanding officer is concerned."

"Oh," said Fuery again.

"He's a complicated man."

"He's… ah, he's…"

"Yes?"

Kain opted for the diplomatic approach: "I'm sure I haven't known him long enough to form an opinion yet, sir."

The corner of Falman's mouth fought a smile. "Really? Well, it took Lieutenant-General Hakuro less than thirty seconds to storm from the office, proclaiming the Lieutenant-Colonel 'an impertinent, insufferable egotist.' His words."

Fuery flushed scarlet. "Uh…"

"Yes, well," Falman bobbed his shoulders in a shrug; he smiled properly –– the lines around his eyes made him look like an old photograph of a young man, often crushed, but ironed carefully so that only the ghosts of creases remained, "though the Lieutenant-General is hardly alone in his sentiment, it is not one I share."

Something shifted, faintly, but the change was almost palpable. Something not unlike a burgeoning friendship sat lightly between them, an ephemeral closeness, without weight or gravity and, perhaps most principally, without effort. Kain inferred some newfound camaraderie under Falman's awkward mumble.

Kain _wanted_ to say that Roy Mustang was, based on initial impressions, absurdly untidy, unfairly handsome, and tirelessly childish. The young Flame Alchemist had one of those mysterious, utterly unexplainable personalities that filled Fuery's senses with an odd disquietude. Every moment spent in the Lieutenant-Colonel's company triggered a vague, itching unrest. Even his voice, a sound like whiskey and wood smoke, carried a tingling, psychic prophecy of dangerous things yet to come. His eyes would flash knowingly and with fine-edged intuition, the color the peculiar, paradoxical darkness of black marble or the strobe effect of sunlight through wrought-iron fencing.

Kain thought back to the Lieutenant-Colonel's debriefing earlier that week –– how he spoke with the languid ease with which a cat stretches itself in a patch of sunlight. He'd let the words roll off his tongue; sometimes he'd add a chin stroke for good measure. And he always, _always_ looked incredibly pleased with himself, even when his adjutant, despite her irreproachable discipline, did not.

If anything, Second Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye was just as impossible to understand and interpret as her superior, if not more so. Everything about her seemed sweet on the surface, pale like honey, with her short thatch of hair and amber-colored eyes. But she was golden in the same way a single strand of wheat in the vastness of the prairies was golden. She wore her presence and poise as markedly as her uniform, living in the present moment according to truth and principle. There was a fascinating duality about Lieutenant Hawkeye –– at some moments she was a strict, sharp-eyed, buttoned-up, requisite officer who rattled off facts and figures and rules and regulations with ease. And at other times, times when she was alone with one of them, or when the Lieutenant-Colonel bothered to complete his requisition forms in a timely fashion, she was a gentle, understanding person who shed her cynicism like an old coat and engaged them all in playful debates about subjects like history and progressive politics. Kain thought it spoke well of Hawkeye's character that she had a genuine concern for those less fortunate than herself.

Kain wondered from what corner of her being her compassion came from, if it was part and parcel of the fragility of having survived the battlefields of Ishval. So often, both the Lieutenant-Colonel and his adjutant seemed close to choking in repugnant nostalgic thoughts. They slipped briefly into despondency; he'd beared witness to it in their signing incident reports or staring forlornly out the window, alone with memories of what ought to have been long forgotten.

How sad they both seemed, Kain wanted to say. How _enormous…_ a cascade, a thousand selves and sensations stacked inside their chests like little dominoes, poised to topple.

But what Kain said, aloud, was: "The Lieutenant and Lieutenant-Colonel seem very accomplished, sir."

The Warrant Officer nodded. "The latter is the youngest State Alchemist ever commissioned, hedging out his predecessor by seven years." Falman strolled onto the East City bridge, Kain in tow. "And Lieutenant Hawkeye is the best sharpshooter in the military. They have surpassed mere accomplishment, Sergeant."

Once started, ruminating on each of his other new teammates became inevitable. In any case, for Kain Fuery, whose mind was so often wrapped up in radio wires and technical drafting paper, the act of consciously and purposefully paying attention to details and their antecedents and consequences made those same details objective targets for thoughtful observation. People were not radios, of course, but both, Kain figured, required a little tuning every now and again.

There were six of them in total: the Lieutenant-Colonel and his underlings. Second Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye, Warrant Officers Havoc, Breda, and Falman... and Kain Fuery, sergeant.

Fuery peered at the side of Falman's head as they ambled back towards the enlisted men's dormitories, crossing the East River by way of the bridge. The Warrant Officer's face was all juts and angles and cold shaded parts the sun never touched, so pale it was almost paper white. Falman saw the world in simple shades of gray and found it hard to be patient with things that struck him as illogical or idiotic. Still, there was something to be said for Falman's bloody-minded reliance on reason, for it was Kain's experience that those men who were long on logic and formulas were frequently short on any present reckoning of the material world.

Jean Havoc, on the other hand, was everything Vato wasn't –– height nonewithstanding. His was a handsome face poised between an expression perpetually sarcastic yet sensitive. It was an interesting combination, and one Kain was not entirely sure how to interpret. Fuery was no great reader of faces, nor were his powers of intuition likely to raise any eyebrows, but Kain had been around enlisted men long enough to know that Havoc's snide irony was perfectly ordinary while his acute emotional clairvoyance was not. He wasn't as good a marksman as Lieutenant Hawkeye –– Kain doubted _anyone_ was –– and he didn't share Breda's knack for tactics and strategy. In fact, Kain admitted to himself, a mite guiltily, from what few interactions he'd had with his superior, Jean Havoc hadn't seemed all that bright.

But Kain suspected the Lieutenant-Colonel hadn't conscripted Havoc on account of his intellectual prowess. Fuery knew it as soon as he saw Havoc's eyes for the first time –– a bright, brilliant blue, the color of cornflowers; Kain reckoned they could pierce through pretense like icicles spearing a snow drift. It was uncanny: Kain anticipated Jean's tendency to... well, _play the field_ , coupled with his sensitivity, colliding to make some wave. Like two currents of opposite spin, meeting and canceling.

But they didn't.

The third Warrant Officer was a largish, roundish man with a robust frame and a general air of negligent repose. He kept his coppery red-hair cropped short, save for a single untidy furrow running from forehead to nape. Heymans Breda and Havoc had been close friends at the Eastern Military Academy, as Fuery understood it, and their easy companionship lent tenability to a longstanding relationship. They complemented each other: Havoc was as tall and thin as Breda was short and round –– where Jean grinned and waxed comical with just about everything, Heymans remained quiet and aloof, his arms across and his ruddy face fixed in an expression of sullen impassivity; even then, it would have been stern but for the humor that lurked about the mouth.

Breda's reputation preceded him. According to Fuery's stodgy old instructors, Heymans was one of those people to whom various subjects and disciplines came easily, but who did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted. Those teachers had been of a mind that an exceedingly confident or uncommonly enlightened genius would in theory make a terrible student. Kain saw some wisdom in the supposition: after all, why would anyone take the Academy seriously when they felt they could outwit the professors?

"You're all so..." Fuery fought to find the right words, "so... _large_."

He didn't realize he had spoken aloud until Falman gave a small facial shrug. "I'm not sure Officer Breda would care for that description, Sergeant."

"Not like that!" cried Kain, mortified, waving his hands in front of his face as though to ward off the implication. "Your reputations... your renown... you're all so incredible."

"The others, certainly, but I'm not sure I warrant your admiration."

"Warrant Officer, I––"

Before Kain could finish, he caught an elbow in the ribs. Fuery yelped, but the offending passerby had already disappeared into the suddenly thick crowd. The two officers found themselves standing amongst a cluster of black long-coats and heather-gray scarves; together, the crowd looked like the wilted petals on a dead flower, with Falman and Fuery buzzing between the wilted stamens. The people around Kain pressed him further towards the edge of the bridge, a particularly forceful jostle nearly knocking all the air out of his lungs. But in that moment, he had forgotten about doing anything so basic as breathing.

"What on earth is going on?" murmured Falman; if Kain didn't know better, he'd say the usually taciturn man sounded almost irritated.

Ignoring Falman's indignant grumbling, Kain struggled through the crowd, standing on the tips of his toes and using other people's shoulders to lift himself slightly over the sea of hair and hats. The shouting swelled, a wave about to break. Kain's gaze fell towards the edge of the bridge and the breath left his body all at once, struck dumb by the sight –– the details, once sharp, suddenly writhing and dancing in the gray autumn light like shadows twisting up around a flame.

 _... a man running across the bridge. He was a silhouette, cast black against the gray of the sky. He looked the way the world looked without Kain's glasses. Vaguely hued, indistinct…_

Kain surveyed the gathering of strangers, their blank faces, pale and gray, staring at the bridge's waist-high rail which glistened with condensation in the chill September afternoon. Some of the crowd had already dissolved into tears, unable to comprehend the finality of the moment, but Kain just felt numb; he couldn't cry, not yet. He glanced up at Vato. The Warrant Officer's complexion was white, his eyes, unblinking, fixed firmly on the man perched on the rail. Falman's face was a picture of horrified remorse, as though the man were already drowned in the river.

Kain couldn't tell how much of the shouting came from his own mouth. He was borne up on the swell of it… he _became_ the sound. They were all of them howling together.

"Sir," stammered Fuery, tugging Falman's sleeve in a gesture so childish it was almost laughable, "we have to clear this crowd..."

"Sergeant––"

"We have to get the other civilians off the bridge, sir!"

Falman swallowed, his Adam's apple jerking in his skinny throat like a plumb bob on a string. "Right... right. Form a cordon around the person in crisis, Sergeant... I'll see if I can flag down the MPs. Kain..." Vato grimaced, flashing teeth narrow and crooked. His eyes were tired and bloodshot, but burning with resolve. " _Do not approach the man_. That's an... that's an order."

The Warrant Officer leveled on the young Sergeant. Their shared silence –– a silence multiplied –– seemed a supernatural burden, whose inexplicable weight brought dread to Kain's soul.

Before Fuery could offer an acknowledgment to the order, however, Vato's long legs carried him back through the crowd towards the main street. Falman removed his Eastern Command clearance papers from his breast pocket and –– after lifting his military registration card and waving it about –– the crowd parted for him. The Warrant Officer, of an uncommon height, loomed over the civilians like a gargoyle watching the congregation disperse, an idol consecrated to the gods of method and mechanism.

A flicker of defiance flared briefly in Kain Fuery's heart. Flashing his own card, he ordered the crowd back from the stranger. Then, taking a deep breath, Kain stepped through his own cordon.

The would-be jumper was a dark, slender man of average height. He gave no indication of having heard anyone in the general vicinity, none of the simpering, sobbing onlookers. He stayed fixed in place at the edge of the bridge, seeming to have wrapped himself in a composure not easily disturbed despite the pleas for his reconsideration or the swollen waters roiling beneath him.

All along the bridge, the colors of the civilians' clothing, the timbre of their voices, lowered and darkened. Kain couldn't help but think of animals gathering at a salt lick during a drought: carnivores rubbing shoulders with prey. The boy felt a turgid press of inevitability under the air, blistering and weeping as it grew…

It was a sensation strangely familiar, that fierce, oppressive foreboding. Kain possessed any number of ways to dispel the feeling: a rapid count to ten, a physical shrug, a short prayer… but only after he had taken the time to swill the details around in the glass of his mind, stirring up what remained of a fragrant bouquet. A man. A bridge. Kain inferred their correspondences in an instant, as though they had been ordained together. Cain and Abel, because a part of Fuery he wasn't entirely fond of seemed to relish the irony, and because who knew how the biblical Cain might have turned out if he too had been granted a second chance...

Kain approached the man. He felt as though hands wielding kitchen knives had snatched hold of his chest, their blades chopping through fear and fat and bone, through terror and tendon as if they were all the same thing –– only a slight variation in grain, visible only once something had been split in half.

Kain stared at the man –– tall, handsome, who would have seemed young and in the prime of life if not for his eyes –– the color of a dimmed, soft-lustered metal, like molten gold, and sad. So, so sad. They were empty eyes, a kind of resigned, tired absence in them. From Kain's vantage, the man's perch on the bridge rail rested right below the shriveled-core of the autumn sun, his gaze yo-yoing between Kain's approaching figure and the swells of the river. His finger whipped up to his forehead and Kain flinched at the sudden movement. But all the man did was push a straggling curl of dark hair away from his eyes.

Kain forced himself to meet the stranger's gaze. Fuery knew with absolute certainty the man wouldn't be fooled with falsehoods or empty reassurances. Once someone had glimpsed something's true nature, it grew rather hard to see the veneer as anything but counterfeit, no matter how bright the shine. Kain figured the man knew enough of life's barbarity to suss out cruelty from kindness.

"Hey," said Kain, the word weak and serrated. Then, clearing his throat: "Hey... you don't wanna do this."

The man's head hunched over his chest, his fingers white-knuckled on the rail. He leaned closer to the water, edging his hands further away from his body. The motion of sunlight on the water illuminated his tired, worn face, frown-lines boring deeply into his skin. His expression was of frustration and fatigue; he seemed suddenly incredibly old, more like a man swimming in the tide waters of his seventh decade than the thirty-something-year-old man he really was. He looked over at Kain with the faintest trace of a smile. And it was not a look of discovery, but of familiar contemplation.

Yet he stayed silent, those listless yellow eyes just watching, not telling, reflecting the open, opalescent gray of the autumnal sky.

"Please, sir," said Kain, trying so desperately to meet the man's eyes and comprehend something of the measure of human misery and anguish the Sergeant saw there.

Trying... and failing.

"Sir..." he swallowed past the stone in the pit of his throat, "I'm –– I'm with the military, sir. My name is––"

"Your name is Kain Fuery," murmured the man. "You're a soldier. You're trying to save my life. And you're not going to succeed."

The man's voice made Kain's heart leap and his eyes fill with tears. The timbre hit a low register, the range of the classically-trained baritones Kain would listen to on the radio. The words melded into a melody and harmony constructed with an almost mathematical precision. Fuery had never heard anything so pure, so utterly captivating. Every intonation and inflection so perfectly crafted, not a single syllable misplaced.

It didn't strike Kain as all that significant that the man knew his name. Faced with the inevitable, Fuery's own questions and curiosities seemed suddenly microscopic and unimportant. As the two strangers regarded one another, a gust of wind whipped a strand free from the jumper's head of curly black hair and across his cheekbone. He held Kain's gaze, and for a moment, Fuery saw his own fear and anguish mirrored, intensified, in the man's eyes.

"My name is Noel," he said. The man –– Noel –– smiled. "I'm sorry we had to meet under these circumstances, Kain Fuery. Perhaps things will be better, with the others."

In a flash, Kain felt a profound rebellion against the solemnity of the forthcoming tragedy. "Please, get off the rail. We can get you help, we can fix this––"

Noel's haunted eyes belied his casual tone: "Isn't it odd, Kain?" he murmured, his deep, sonorous voice thrumming in Fuery's bones. "When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to commend them for their perseverance, their strength of spirit. And yet they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that a man simply gave up the will to live. Nothing could be further from the truth."

Fuery hiccoughed. "Do you really want to die?"

"No one commits suicide because they want to die."

"Then why do it?"

"Because I want to stop living." Noel sighed... a long, tired sound, full of upset. He began to thump something against his leg, an object Kain hadn't noticed before... a thin, blue book, with a silver moon embossed on the cover.

"Time..." said Noel, more to himself than to Sergeant Fuery. "It has begun to dissolve into itself, as shapeless as the rain. Again and again, I've pierced my own past like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth. I can't think of any other way to make it stop, you see. I didn't want to resort to this, but..." he watched the river churn and whirlpool beneath the pylons, "exhaustion, I think, has turned me desperate."

"Make _what_ stop?" demanded Kain. "Maybe... maybe I can help. We can put an end to whatever's causing this to happen."

"You are a kind boy, Kain... but I fear this is quite beyond your capabilities to fix." He turned to Fuery, finally breaking his vigil of the river, and asked softly, "Is this wrong of me?"

"I think..." Kain's esophagus spasmed, causing the Sergeant to skip a breath. His fingers worried at the crease in his trousers. "I think you're b-being selfish. I think there is a way to make things right, and I don't think this is it."

"I realize how depraved of me it is to instill false guilt in an innocent person's conscience, Kain, to cause a distorted image of life for you hereafter. But for whatever meagre consolation it is, know that I am content with my decision."

"You said _desperate_ , before... you can't feign contentment when you're doing this out of hopelessness!"

"Maybe not..." Noel shifted forward on his haunches. "Shall we find out?"

"No!"

"Think fast, Sergeant Fuery."

Noel threw something directly at Kain's face, and Kain was too stunned and scared to dodge or lift his hands. The projectile –– Noel's blue book –– smacked Fuery right between his eyes, splintering his glasses, causing the young soldier to cry out and snatching him from his stupefaction. Red light danced in Kain's peripheries. Tears brimmed in his eyes and his entire nose smarted.

Then Kain heard the screaming of the crowd. A moment later, the splash.

He crashed against the edge of the rail, tears falling freely down his cheeks. Kain could not see a body floating in the river below, and to his horror, the boy realized he felt absolutely nothing. Maybe because he expected Noel, at any moment, to surface and begin the doggie-paddle towards the shore before walking off. In a story, the birds would have joined forces in a show of gratitude and broken Noel's fall, carried him to a faraway land of safety.

Through Kain's sudden tears, the gray autumn light, the pale faces of stricken passerby, smeared like shooting stars. Lying before the rippling, turbid window of the river, below the slurred glare of the afternoon sun, it was as if he was underwater.

Two hours later, and it fell to a military policeman to uncurl Fuery's fingers from Noel's blue book...


	3. Saturn -- Lead

_|| "... Saturn is associated with staunch willpower, observation, and transition…" ||_

Heymans Breda

* * *

 **June 14th, 1900**

* * *

 _No son of mine._

It was dark by the time Heymans jolted awake.

His head hurt. There was a band of tightness around his chest, making it difficult to breath. He braced himself against the bench and took several long, deep swallows of oxygen. He looked up and down the East City street, and attempted to frame the scenery in measurements and mathematics –– the number of flowers on the purple wisteria, the ratio of couples to loners strolling across the bridge, the velocity of the river –– in an effort to calm himself.

The lamplighters had been busy while he dozed. The diffuse yellow globes, spaced equidistant to each other along the street, made the stars that were beginning to glimmer in the night sky dim and distant. There were little pools of brightness under the lamps, and now and then a streetcar passed, lighting up Heymans's hair, or his eyes, or the silver chain of his pocket watch. Heymans was alone at the trolley stop save for one other man, sitting at the far end of the bench. The traveler kept himself to himself, writing in a notebook, his head down, using what remained of the meagre light cast by the streetlamp.

 _No son of mine_.

Heymans shook his head to clear it, shaggy ginger hair flying about his face.

He wasn't sure of what he'd been dreaming about, in the same way that, when he played chess, he couldn't be sure of his offensive positioning until he'd had a chance to castle his pieces. But he had the strangest feeling that he'd been dreaming of alien planets circling forgotten stars: lost worlds inside other lost worlds, all ambulating over the impenetrable surface of the cosmos. A universe with only one surface and only one edge, the people trapped inside the tesseract like ants crawling along a single continuous curve.

Heymans looked out at the city and catalogued its containments, its colors, the penury and the opulence, the hazy memories, the cut-crystal recollections. He watched the road and the river and the tenebrous ribbon of the lantern-lights on the cobblestones.

But as he contemplated the tense stillness of the night, on sensing that insidious silence, Heymans wondered, vaguely, what the hell might be festering out there, hidden in the margins of the world. He pretended for a moment that by virtue of the streetcars, the city would be set alight and he would see what it was that had been going on in the shadows. Maybe a whole slew of new things, maybe even some good things. Or maybe not.

Not even in his half-awake musings did he get his hopes up too high...

 _No son of mine._

"Shut the fuck up," he muttered.

He closed his eyes, and the memory returned, pulling at his insides like the breath he would take after coming up from a long swim underwater. Tasting that sip of oxygen he feared he'd never have again, only to find the air turned to poison...

* * *

 _"You're stagnating, both of you," seethed Heymans, his face turning blotchy and as red as his hair. "So wrapped up in your dogma and so convinced by your own beliefs that you've stopped seeing the truth. Amestris is a country at war, and you won't change that by writing term papers! Sitting on your arses griping about the need for pacifism doesn't amount to an absence of violence, Mum. It enthrones violence! It leaves the violators unchanged and the consequences unremedied!"_

* * *

He couldn't really split his family down the middle, Mum and Da and their ideals on one side, the yearning for change on the other, with Heymans divided between. It was like ripping a piece of paper into two: no matter how long or hard he tried, the seams never fit exactly right again. The tiniest of pieces were lost in the severing, and their absence kept everything from being complete.

* * *

 _"This world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, then you must resist the call to arms with every fiber of your being. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Thesis and antithesis. Underline it twice, boy. It's all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Heymans... you are one man. What could you possibly hope to accomplish?"_

* * *

No one fought dirtier or more brutally than blood relatives... even when those relatives were academics. _Especially_ when those relatives were academics. Instead of spitting and fists they fought with rhetoric and abstract compositional techniques, scholarship and snobbery. It was far less honest, thought Heymans, as though they wanted to cut him down to size but didn't have the decency to unsheathe the knife from its holsters of civilization and sophistication.

Only family knew its own weaknesses, the exact placement of each other's hearts. The tragedy, Heymans supposed, was that kinship lasted through life and death, immutable, unchanging, no matter how great the misdeed or betrayal. It could be denied or ignored, but it could no more be undone than closing the window shades undid the reality of a rainy day.

He almost wished he had a chord to cut or a rope to burn. Something to make the separation real, to annul the relationship indefinitely.

Because Heymans wasn't loved. Heymans wasn't even liked. His own parents, the people who by virtue of _evolution_ were supposed to do those very things, held the unequivocal consensus that Heymans was an aberration –– his ideals deviant, his choices irreconcilable.

* * *

 _His hands balled to fists, uncharacteristically demonstrative. "I want to change this country," said Heymans firmly, green eyes hard and unflinching, "and I want to make sure men of every nation, not just this one, have the opportunity to live without fear or hunger or hatred... as brothers, Da, not as brutes mired in ignorance and war."_

 _His father's broad, hawkish nose jutted into the air like the prow of a boat. "You intend to do that as a soldier, do you? One of those same brutes? Armed with unlimited license for excess... excessive violence, excessive sex, all the necessary blueprints for self-destruction. Yes, the arrangement sounds very egalitarian, my boy."_

 _"The fact of the matter is," interjected Mum, "you are voluntarily choosing war over peace, violence over sufferance."_

 _Her wine stem sat perched at the edge of the table, with an equal chance of tottering either right or left. Heymans was half tempted to put his fist through it to help it make up its mind. After all, peace and glass both tended to shatter under repeated blows._

 _"Only Führer Bradley chooses war, Mum," snapped Heymans. "The rest of us are condemned to it."_

 _"He may declare war in the legislative sense, but his pack of rabid dogs are the ones who enforce it."_

 _"Better a dog than a chicken in a barnyard waiting to see whether his neck will be the next one under the axe!"_

 _"You would murder for him!"_

 _"I would fight for myself. For you and Da."_

 _"There are no causes worth killing for, Heymans."_

 _"But plenty worth dying for."_

* * *

The memories did not awaken desire and regret so much as sorrow –– a vast melancholy. His parents were past... they belonged to a time long gone from his own –– one of those lost worlds from his dreams –– standing remote on some distant horizon, their silhouettes near indistinguishable against the glare of the setting sun. They were unattainable... and in his heart of hearts, Heymans knew it.

The night was too still for hope, but too alive for reassurances.

As he sat there, shivering in the brief night-time chill, it dawned on him that it was the end of his childhood. And the beginning of something he could not quite name...

There was no going back.

Heymans realized, abruptly, that he would never see them again.

And he doubted they would long notice the absence.

Heymans felt a great wave of shame and sadness crash against the inside of his head, as though his mind were stagnant water suddenly disturbed by the profound convulsion of his cognizance.

He was alone. Flawed, fragile, cast-off. And completely, utterly alone.

Heymans felt the wave build higher and steeper until a part of him worried it would darken the stars. He felt the crest tremble and begin to spill, the great mass crashing down with the whole weight of the ocean behind it against the iron-bound walls of his skull. He sucked in a shuddering breath, too quiet for a sob but too suffocating for a sigh.

But as the wave frittered its force and the waters receded, the bleak desolation of his thoughts remained; his despair had not moved him a single centimeter.

Heymans rested his head in his hands, ran his fingers through his thick crop of hair.

"Are you all right?"

Heymans jackknifed into a sitting position, startled –– he peered sidelong at his scribbling friend at the other end of the bench.

He was a young man, late twenties perhaps, with a stooped, thin frame, a pointy nose, and a head of curly black hair. Paying closer attention, exercising a scrutiny that bordered on the prying, Heymans found the other man's face lined despite his age, taught and tired and deeply inhabited.

"I'm fine," muttered Heymans. He was wary of the man with the young-old face, and had no immediate desire to chat with a stranger so late in the evening, alone on a shadowy street corner.

"You look sad," said the man.

So do you, thought Heymans to himself, but did not say aloud.

"Where are you headed?"

Heymans took his pocket watch from his waistcoat. Clicking open the lid, his drawn, grim reflection frowned back at him. Distorted by the curvature of the glass, it damned the hands that appeared not to move. And yet they had eaten the past hour, albeit painfully slowly. "Giribaz," he grunted, after a pause.

The man cocked his head, an alarmingly jerky motion like snapping a glow-stick. "There's nothing in Giribaz save the Eastern Military Academy... a few ramshackle holes in the wall, and, well..." he shrugged, " _other_ venues of a slightly more fleshy nature, I suppose. Part and parcel with an Academy town."

Heymans nodded, looking tired.

"You're a little young, aren't you?" The stranger corrected himself hurriedly: "For the Academy, not the... not the other places."

"Fifteen."

The man seemed surprised, but after a moment shrugged it off, quite literally. "Sixteen is the state-sanctioned enlistment age."

A sharp blade of irritation went through Heymans, deep and quick. "I'm aware of that," he grumbled, crossing his arms.

"You're running away."

It was not a question. Heymans stiffened, and his expression shuttered closed, eyes going hard and frosty.

"That ain't any of your business," he said in a voice that matched his eyes.

"No, I suppose it isn't. Forgive me... I tend to be a bit talkative."

"You have an impressive arsenal of conciliatory statements."

"And _you_ an impressive tendency to mix his colloquialisms and his formalities. You're like a bartender with only a periphery understanding of density physics. I daresay the East City slang sits poorly on your tongue, though I suppose the military will set that to rights before long. What were your parents? Rhetoricians? Linguists?"

"Professors."

"How novel." He chuckled. "So was I. _Am_ I. Am going to be? I'm really not sure any more."

It occurred to Heymans then that the man might have been well and truly cracked. The fifteen year old scooted ever so slightly further to his right, until an inch of his bum hung over the side of the bench. Heymans was brawny enough that people tended to leave him well enough alone, but something about the man communicated uncertainty, which by its nature made Heymans worried and uneasy... there was a splintered light behind the man's yellow eyes, like stress fractures in a piece of amber glass.

Despite all this, the man's expression remained pleasant, with an inkling of wistfulness, while the soft glimmer of his lucid eyes and the brush of his thick lashes against his cheeks betrayed something of a poet or a dreamer... his parents would be liable to describe the man as empty-headed.

Maybe not crazy, then. Maybe just... a little lost.

Heymans could understand that.

"Family spats are what keep us on an even keel, aren't they?" murmured the man thoughtfully. "However, there's bickering over whose turn it is to set the laundry out to dry, and then there's bickering about something the consequences of which drive their boy to enlistment––"

"Who are you?"

"Pardon?"

Heymans sat up. "Who are you?" he repeated, rearing his shoulders back and meeting the man's eyes, defiant.

He shrugged. "A tiny little character in the big book of your life."

"That's not an answer."

"What would constitute an answer to you, then?"

"A name."

He smiled. "Noel."

"Are you escaped from somewhere or something, Noel?"

He laughed. "Not the first time someone has asked me that. I suppose I _have_ escaped from somewhere, but it's unlikely to be the place you're expecting."

"Not the sanatorium on the hill, then."

"Ah, no. You might say I have escaped a linear system. It's funny... the illusions of reality are often dressed in endless reflections." Noel gave a small shrug. "The blind will continue to be guided by the blind. The unknown concept is recognized by those who have tasted the fruit of a quantum existence, but actual comprehension is a thing largely untenable… children trying to grasp the stars from the reflection of an empty pond."

"And let me guess," said Heymans guardedly, unmindful of masking his doubt and wariness, "you're one of those few who _do_ understand."

"In a manner of speaking. Consider..." Noel smiled on instinct, with curled lips, like an animal wanting nothing more than to scamper off to lick his wounds in the darkest of corners of the world. "All _this_ ," he waved his hands about, "isn't real." He said it matter of factly, with the perfectly poised inflection of a university lecturer –– Heymans decided he would have preferred the mindless dithering of a Grade-A brain case.

"The particles that constitute all living and non living things are not real; they form a world of potentialities and possibilities rather than one of being. The quantum fields to which all matter belongs are the sum of these possibilities and, somehow, _one_ possibility is chosen out of all the existing ones just by _seeing_ it, just by the very act of _detecting_ it, whenever one tries to probe a particle's nature. This branches the universe continually out like budding yeast into an infinitude of realities that contain every possibility.

"In other words, my iterations are a population consisting of only one creature. The featureless trundle of my existence has begun to change. At the time, I didn't have the insight to wonder at the transient nature of despair, but now that I've been scattered, I am able to see how little it takes to turn a person's life around for better or worse. An event will do, or an idea. Another person. An idea of a person. A mere inkling to collapse the superposition. Split the world asunder."

Heymans trembled with the sudden shock of... something –– he wanted to be alarmed. He wanted to turn tail and leave the madman alone to his strange musings. Heymans felt as though, the entire evening, Noel had been preempting himself, feeding Heymans his lines as one half of a piecemeal conversation that seemed neither causal nor coherent. Heymans's meagre attempt to anticipate the direction of the discussion had largely foundered, as had his efforts at making sense of Noel himself, and yet... Heymans felt as though he partially comprehended the man, or, at least, that he was nearing the verge of comprehending him.

Heymans couldn't pretend to fully grasp Noel's universe of potential and possibility, or what the man meant by his muttering about singularities and pluralities; the arc was a long one, and his eyes were not very sharp. Despite Heymans's mathematical aptitude, he couldn't calculate the curve and complete the figure and solve the sums. But he could, perhaps, divine some small understanding...

"Chess," said Heymans suddenly.

"Oh?"

"There are sixty four squares on a chessboard," he went on before his nerve failed him, "There are 400 different positions after each player makes one move apiece. There are 72,084 positions after two moves apiece. There are more than nine million positions after three moves. There are 288 _billion_ different possible positions after four. After that... it's infinite."

"An infinite cascade of realities caught between two people, played out on sixty four squares."

"Yeah."

"Chess." Noel nodded. "I can tell a lot about a person by the type of recreation they're drawn to. You say chess, and I think of someone with a meticulous eye for detail, for strategy. But that's an easy assumption, is it not? Not the sort of thing that impresses someone like you very much."

"Like me?"

"Hmm mmm. A skeptic." He studied Heymans intently, and the latter was surprised to find himself unaffected, buffered from Noel's scrutiny by the three feet of space separating them on the bench.

Noel rubbed his scruffy chin with his knuckle. "I would say a person who plays chess with any degree of seriousness is a person who believes in the efficacy of combat, but not necessarily war. A person who believes in free will, but also in the existence of a natural chain of command, pardon the expression, in all societies. Aware of it, and accepting of it. I would say such a person has the capacity to be awed by human nature and horrified by it, in equal amounts. A scientist's brain, but an artist's soul. How am I doing?"

Heymans looked back at Noel blandly, keeping his sharp corners hidden. He did not say so aloud, but Heymans affirmed to himself that chess was, to him, a unique link between pairs of opposites: the game was mechanical in structure, yet made effective only by the efficacy of creative thought. The chequerboard was limited to a geometrically fixed space, yet the movement of the pieces provided a near unlimited number of combinations. Strategy necessitated flexibility and vision, and yet the overall objective remained ostensibly sterile.

His Da's words came back to him, suddenly:

 _Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Thesis and antithesis._

Perhaps chess was less a matter of unifying opposites and more a case of mutual annihilation, a subatomic particle crashing into its antiparticle and destroying itself. Realities colliding.

Heymans considered, for a moment, that chess held no special meaning, didn't transport him anywhere. He had nothing to achieve by playing chess. In the end, he hurt no one and no one got hurt. There was no real victory, no real defeat. He was a human being, an _intellectual_ human being, bending the entire force of his mind on the ridiculous task of forcing a wooden king into the corner of a wooden board.

It all seemed suddenly so pointless...

Thoughts that lead nowhere. Mathematics calculating nothing. Art without production. Architecture without substance. Perhaps in admitting his enthusiasm for the game, Heymans had revealed more of himself than he had originally intended...

But though he had little practice talking to strangers, Heymans had never been the most expansive or effusive person. So, he said nothing of his thoughts, and only offered Noel a short, brusque shrug.

"You reckon because I play chess I've got some kinda... I dunno, schmaltzy imagining of conflict and combat. That couldn't be further from the truth. If something's important enough to a person, they'll fight for it. If you wanna collect change, you gotta be ready to levy the charge. There's nothing romantic or noble about doing what's necessary. It's all about balance. Quid pro quo."

Noel quirked his eyebrows. "Are you an alchemist, by chance?"

"No."

"Interesting." He studied Heymans. "And yet, there are those who argue that peace should never come at the cost of human blood."

"By that logic, we would never have peace. Amestris is always gonna be at war with somebody. The least I can do is make sure the victory means something."

"Or the defeat," said Noel quietly.

Heymans hung his head, his eyes drifting to the river, where the reflection of the street-lamps in the otherwise black water stretched out like flaming stilts, ruffled by the cool breeze. Perhaps Mum and Da were right... that it wouldn't matter what he did. The hearts and minds of the men in power were far beyond fickle –– they were insensible, predatory little things distracted by the first shiny bauble or bullet casing that rolled across the floor. Perhaps nothing Heymans ever said or did would possibly make any kind of dent in their mindless aggression.

"I am a man that knows of the reality of failure," Noel went on, solemn and still, "and I have suffered defeat. Other versions of me would argue I am condemned by it. I have made a grave miscalculation, and I am left to live with the consequences. Sometimes, even the living becomes a chore."

"In other words, I've made an arse of myself, and I'm as mad as you are," grumbled Heymans, his mood suddenly black.

"No. Perhaps this is a small defeat, this sitting alone at a cold streetcar station with little more than the clothes on your back, talking to a ghost. Perhaps your parents are right in valuing their capacity for forbearance above the loss of human life. But I also know that this country has not yet reached a place where we are able to lay down our arms free of consequence or catastrophe. Your parents wish to resurrect this society from the ashes of war, but Heymans, the real war has not yet been fought."

"They'd call you a glory hound."

"I am –– _was_ –– that. Some believe it is selfish to want something with such earnest intent, but desire is also human nature. If we are talking syllogisms, then I suppose human nature is, by the same principle, also selfish."

* * *

 _"You selfish boy."_

 _Mum stood to face Heymans, her eyes flat and angry. Her scowl could have stripped the paint from the wall. She was broad and strong and her crossed arms afforded her son no warmth, no reassurance._

 _"No son of mine will put on that uniform," she said, her words driving a rod of ice through Heymans's chest even as he felt his skin burning with humiliation. "You cowardly, obstinate, selfish boy."_

 _"Mum––"_

 _"Your urge to destroy what you can neither subdue nor control contradicts every fundemental value upheld by this family."_

 _Heymans knew what was coming next. He knew... and Mum's cruelty in preempting his exile was an act of inviolable contempt for his own dignity. He felt the slow simmer of shame roiling in his gut._

 _No son of mine..._

 _"Get out."_

 _It was like there were candles spitting and flaring in his stomach. Flames burning and smoking, turning his insides black with soot and ash. "Mum... Da..."_

 _"Pack your things. And get out of our house."_

* * *

 _No son of mine._

Perhaps he was selfish. Perhaps he had been afforded little choice in the matter.

He _had_ to be selfish. He had to push the pieces around the board aimlessly, for as long as he lived.

So others wouldn't have to...

"It's interesting," said Noel suddenly, breaking the teenager from his reverie. "Your name, Heymans... it sounds quite a lot like a name in my mother tongue, _Haimona_. Haimona translates roughly to _he who listens_. And you're a very good listener." Noel chuckled, an affectation Heymans suspected the man exaggerated when serious matters were troubling his mind. "Conversely, my old colleague, Haimona Breda, couldn't pay attention worth a damn!"

 _Breda_... it was an old name –– it meant _power, strength, vigor, virtue._ Heymans liked the sound of it. He was in the market for a new surname, anyway... he didn't think his old Da would readily thank him for keeping the family's.

The headlights of a streetcar trundled towards the station. The beams lit a path along the street, dipped so as not to dazzle the oncoming traffic. It was not the transport to Giribaz, but...

"This is where we say goodbye," said Noel, rising from the bench. "I am looking for a book, you see. I might find it in the Central Library, First Branch, or in the court martial office. They keep telling me different things."

Heymans blinked. _One book in the whole First Branch..._ "Good luck with that."

"Well..." Noel considered for a moment. "I once overheard a soldier say that overcoming adversity is an admixture of courage, intelligence, and luck, and since the first two are contigent on the third, I suppose it boils down to just luck."

Heymans made an attempt at a smile. After having felt the need to glower at his parents for most of his life, smiles never came easily to his face. But this one wasn't half bad.

"It was an honor to meet you, Heymans," said Noel.

Heymans wanted to say it back. But he held on to the words greedily, too caught in the habit of keeping himself a secret.

And Noel –– half sadly, half-expectantly –– let him go. He boarded the streetcar, which trundled across the bridge, turned the corner on the street opposite the river, and disappeared.

It was only much, much later, as cadet Heymans –– newly christened Breda –– was searching for his academy bunkmate –– a kid named _Gene_ or something –– that Heymans realized he had never, at any point, given Noel his name...


	4. Mars -- Iron

_|| "... Mars is associated with confidence and self-assertion, strength, and impulsiveness…" ||_

Jean Havoc

* * *

 **October 28th, 1912**

* * *

"HEY! STOP!"

There were times in Jean Havoc's life when he couldn't help but wonder if he'd made a poor choice in careers.

Case in point: the perp he'd been tailing through the quay staith along the East River was fast. _Really_ fast. Falman, the sod, hadn't mentioned speed being a factor when he'd compiled the mission dossiers –– not that Jean had actually _read_ the mission dossier. He'd had Heymans summarize it for him in ten words or less, and while those ten words had been "Read your own damn paperwork for once, you feckless cad," Jean was fairly sure he'd gotten the meat of it.

"THIS IS THE MILITARY!" he bellowed, his lungs distending like two boiled leather bags. Damn cigarettes. "STOP RIGHT THERE!"

He may as well have been shouting in ancient Xerxian for all the good it did him. The man Jean was pursuing didn't check his pace –– the perp was tall and lanky, his strides long, his turnover quick, and his well of adrenaline clearly in no immediate danger of running dry.

"Damnation." It came out as more of a puff than a mutter.

Jean's booted feet pounded out an insane, frantic rhythm as he raced into an abandoned warehouse at a dead sprint. He skidded around the corner and managed to catch himself on one of the wooden pylons, fairly positive he'd given himself a sizable splinter in the process.

He figured the others were not far behind him –– the Colonel had insisted on taking Hawkeye's car, which in turn forced Ri to play chauffeur when Jean knew she'd much rather be hitting the bricks along with the rest of them. Roy could be a right prat sometimes. Regardless, Jean'd heard their military-issue sedan burning rubber a few blocks back.

Falman and Fuery were holed-up somewhere coordinating the canvasing efforts with the head of the military police, while Heymans ought to be close at Havoc's heels, catching up... eventually.

Jean glanced up briefly as he careened through the open bay doors. The roof of the warehouse was domed some seventy-five feet above his head, like a cathedral... if cathedrals were made of corrugated tin and radiated the burnt-hair smell of brazed joints. The perp ignored the grain silos and shipping containers and made for a basement door, slamming it open so it hit the opposite wall with a _bang_ before bolting down the staircase.

It was as though an elastic band had snapped in Jean's muscles, a tug at the base of his spine pulling him into free fall. He could almost taste the fretting in the air, breaths that smacked of volatile solvents, ready to explode.

He dashed down flights of stairs that appeared to increase decimally until there seemed no end to them, no bottom. The whole stairwell hitched crazily from side to side with the speed of his descent. Going around and around, his hand slapping at the worn guardrail to keep from bulleting into the wall at each turn, Jean had a small pocket of time to reflect on the circumstances that had landed him in such a disagreeable situation.

It had started... with six words. Six damning words that had spelled two weeks of the worst undercover work of Jean Havoc's tenure as a member of the Amestrian armed forces.

* * *

 **Two Weeks Earlier**

"I could pose as a professor," said Vato Falman demurely.

Colonel Roy Mustang –– a man whose perpetually cocked left eyebrow, rakish smile, and mussed head of hair made Jean look about as enticing as the underside of Breda's boot by comparison –– gave Falman an indulgent nod, signaling the Warrant Officer to continue.

Falman sighed slightly, as though he already regretted making the suggestion in the first place. He explained: "If the suspect is a member of the Eastern Polytechnic faculty, would it not make sense for a subordinate to go undercover at the institution?"

First Lieutenant Hawkeye, who had up until that point been quiet, dutifully combing through the evidence obtained by Lieutenant-Colonel Hughes, paused in her perusal. "A covert op may be our best course of action, Colonel. A vast majority of the materials documented in the bills of sale," she jerked her head towards the teetering pile of water-stained and curling paper on the corner of her desk, "lack serials or were obtained through third parties."

"Which allowed the original buyer to legally bypass any background checks or registration regulations," added Heymans through a mouthful of mustard and pastrami.

Kain's beetle-black eyes blinked myopically behind his glasses. "Is there a department specializing in alchemy at the University, sir? That might narrow our search."

The room's collective gaze pivoted to Roy, who shook his head emphatically. "Eastern Polytechnic is fully-funded by the Amestrian military, with a vast majority of the students electing to join the reserve officer training corps as a means of offsetting the cost of tuition. With the University falling under the purview of the Department of Defense, state licensure would be a prerequisite to practicing or teaching alchemy."

"And according to the University directory," said Falman, drawing on his impressive memory, "there are no state alchemists currently on staff."

"And, therefore, no alchemists at all," finished Roy with a scowl, waving a hand as if batting off a nuisance fly. "At least, not in any official capacity. Whomever is responsible for buying these materials is operating outside the control of the military. Their backroom operation, coupled with the nature of the acquisitions themselves, doubly condemn them."

"Break the law once, shame on you," munched Breda, "break the law _twice_..."

Kain set aside the spare power plug with which he'd been fiddling. "Pardon me, Colonel, I don't mean to sound ignorant, sir, but what's so strange about purchasing..." the Sergeant glanced over at one of Riza's forms, reading aloud: "fertilizer, soda-silica glass, and moissanite rock?"

"You mean aside from the fact that a carat of moissanite costs more than what I make in a month?" grumbled Jean, his mood black. His date had made some bullshit excuse involving cat claws and lockjaw, so Havoc had committed himself to being grumpy and miserable for the rest of the day.

Hawkeye glared daggers at him, harboring about as much sympathy and regard for Jean's plight as Heymans reserved for his doomed pastrami on rye.

Roy sounded vaguely irritated as he explained: "Moissanite is a naturally occurring carbide compound, a carbon-based semiconductor. Soda-silica glass, which is the main ingredient in most bottles and containers, is lime and silicon dioxide. And fertilizer contains ammonia, of course."

"Of course," muttered Jean.

"In short, the person purchasing these items in bulk is stockpiling not insignificant amounts of carbon, silicon, lime, and ammonia."

Heymans choked on the crust of his sandwich. After giving his chest a few effusive smacks and pointedly ignoring the startled frowns and Riza's raised eyebrow, he spluttered: "This guy is gatherin' the ingredients for human transmutation, ain't he?"

Even in Jean's home backcountry, people whispered about the possibility of human transmutation, but like most folks, Havoc had dismissed the whisperers as alarmist crackpots.

But next to the Colonel stood Falman and Fuery slack-jawed and wide-eyed –– or, at least, as wide as the former's eyes could manage. Further along sat Riza, with a frozen stare so alarming that Jean thought perhaps she had stopped breathing altogether.

"Woah woah, back up a bit, Colonel." Jean had very nearly said _hold your horses_ but had caught himself at the last minute. "Back home, we used to sell soda-silica mason jars and fertilizer to growers all the damn time, especially herbalists. And if they were doin' any indoor planting, the thermal conductivity of moissanite makes for good heat lamps."

"Lieutenant Havoc has a point," murmured Hawkeye, gaze distant, deep in thought.

"All the more reason to check this place out ourselves," argued Heymans. "On the one hand, we gotta guy running an apothecary out of his basement. On the other, some lunatic playing God and bringing dead people back to life. We can't afford to be wrong about this, sirs."

"And what makes you think _Falman_ is the one for the job?"

The Warrant Officer fixed Jean with a pinch-eyed glare, huffing testily, "I am more than capable of infiltrating a university, Lieutenant."

Jean snorted. "The last time we ran a covert op, you took your mask off in the middle of a raid because it 'smelled like feet'."

"Major _Armstrong's_ feet, sir!"

"Look, Vato, nobody here would argue about your _sterling_ idealism in looking to defend us all against the threat from evil alchemical masterminds," said Jean, more than a little sarcastically, trying to mimic Falman's fancy turn of phrases as best he could, "but I'm not champing at the bit to sit with my thumb up my ass for months on end just on the off chance that some egghead with a god complex might turn up."

" _Enough_ ," snapped Mustang, looking between Falman and Havoc, his irritation and annoyance liable to turn to anger in short order. "Going undercover is far from watertight, but it guarantees a small operation and keeps word of an attempt at human transmutation from leaking to the public, which is ultimately in the military's best interests. I will make the necessary preparations with General Grumman. In the meantime, Warrant Officer, cross-reference what we know about the case with Lieutenants Hawkeye and Breda and draw up a preliminary dossier."

Falman clicked his heels. "Yes, sir."

Jean dipped his chin toward his chest and pressed his lips together. Watching Falman play pretend for who-knew-how-long didn't exactly flip his fin, but he had to admit that, for all the Warrant Officer's crippling inexperience in undercover work, and despite the fact that Jean'd never admit it aloud, Vato's idea had merit. Jean doubted a student had the capital –– or the cojones –– to pull off a stunt like human transmutation. That left the faculty. So long as Falman found himself some suitably-tatty tweed and a jaunty bowtie and stuck to surveillance –– using his incredible memory to gather information rather than his painfully awkward mouth to blow his cover –– Roy's entire team wouldn't run the risk of inciting anyone to commit crimes of a type and scale calculated to procure specific sentences. Moreover, they'd catch the perp before he blew up half the campus or something.

"So Bishop heads in, smokes the suspect out, gets on the horn to the military police, and they nab the guy before he does anything stupid," summarized Jean succinctly. While their normal working relations were pervaded by an atmosphere of intrigue and subterfuge, Jean still felt a sense of excitement at the prospect of a recce.

"Well, we may as well give the old man a firearms review," grunted Breda –– Falman looked crestfallen at the suggestion. "Just in case things head south."

"That will not be necessary, Second Lieutenant," said Riza, interjecting smoothly.

"No need to give Falman the schooling, Breda," agreed Roy, his lips twitching. His own choice of words seemed to give the Colonel some grim amusement, until he coughed into relative seriousness again. "Since the rest of you will be going to Eastern Polytechnic with the Warrant Officer."

Jean Havoc blinked. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, then finally said, with all the intelligence he could muster in that moment, "Huh?"

"You're enrolling. Well..." Roy considered for a moment, smirking inwardly at his thoughts, "you might be a bit old to pass for a student, Lieutenant, but I'm sure there are always positions open on the custodial staff."

He was serious. Damn it all, Mustang was being serious.

"Oh no. No no no no no. Like _hell_ you're making me go back to school!"

"I'm not _making_ you do anything. I'm giving you an order. If the Lieutenant says she's needs a name, then it falls to us to provide one."

 _Us_ , he'd said. Not _him_. "And what are you gonna do, _Colonel_?"

"The Colonel's face is too recognizable," said Hawkeye simply. She spoke in her usual matter-of-fact tone, as though there were nothing extraordinary about her words. "We will monitor your progress from Eastern Command."

Heymans frowned. No doubt he'd found the whole scheme highly amusing when it'd just involved Falman's hapless ass, but Breda's own ass was a different matter entirely. "I gotta go with Jean on this one, Boss... I can't say I relish the idea myself."

"Since Warrant Officer Falman's experience in the field is minimal, he'll need backup."

"Oh, come on." Jean scooted back on his chair, trying to put some distance between himself and the paperwork on his desk. He protested, "This was his idea in the first place!"

"And it was a good idea," finished Riza, her steady uptick in impatience simmering like banked embers in her eyes.

The utter dismay must have showed itself in Jean's eyes, for Roy's wry expression faltered and Riza's pen ceased its incessant scratching across the paper. Havoc felt a sharp twinge in his chest, his entire being recoiling at the very idea of returning to school, undercover or no.

Much of Jean's own time at the Eastern Military Academy had passed under a dark cloud of listlessness and depression. He had been dismayed by the other officer cadets' relentless snobbery –– the limpid eyes and frozen-lipped smirks –– not to mention the unremitting struggles Havoc faced with his studies. If it hadn't been for Heymans, Jean wouldn't have finished at all. It had been Breda who made the entire ordeal bearable, Breda who, in the silence of their dorm or in some empty classroom, studying well into the wee hours of the morning, had mumbled encouragement and prodding and prompting and a hundred other things, nameable and not.

As though reading his fellow officer's mind, Heymans sidled up to Havoc, lunch forgotten, resting an elbow on the corner of Jean's desk. Heymans had never been one for sappy or saccharine sentiment –– said it gave him toothache –– but the years had impressed on Havoc the value of even his best friend's smallest, subtlest gestures of reassurance.

"When do we get started?" grunted Breda.

"General Grumman has several contacts within the University proper," said Mustang. "It shouldn't take more than a week to secure positions for the lot of you. Falman, what would you like to teach?"

"How to Piss Off Your Friends in Six Words or Less 101."

"Amestrian History, sir."

Havoc glared sidelong at the Warrant Officer and muttered: "I swear to god, Falman, if this doesn't work, I'm going to stab you in the throat with a pipette."

Hawkeye sighed. "Please refrain from threatening your subordinates, Lieutenant Havoc."

"Havo," said Heymans quietly, close by Jean's ear, "not that I don't empathize with the sentiment n'all, but unless you plan to drown the guy in saline solution one drop at a time, might I suggest a scalpel?"

"Those are the sharp ones, right?"

"There you go."

He knew Heymans was only trying to make him feel better, but Jean's heart wasn't into it. Perhaps he was going a little stir-crazy being cooped up in Eastern Command all the time, but a undercover mission at a school was _not_ the respite Jean had in mind. Besides the fact, Jean tended to favor the age-old philosophy that what can go wrong, will go wrong, and the prospect of a recce going tits-up in a University setting filled Jean with bone-numbing dread.

All the while, Kain –– the poor kid would probably have to pass as an actual _student_ –– didn't react the way Jean'd expected him to react. He'd expected some more sympathy, and maybe even some meek and mild words of protest. What Jean _didn't_ expect was for him to smile. But smile he did. And it was his sideways smile, which told Jean that Fuery knew something Havoc didn't.

"What?" he demanded adamantly.

Kain grinned. "Nothing... it's just..." he coughed, his cheeks growing red from the effort of suppressing his giggles. "Falman... as a professor..."

The mental image was almost enough to cheer Jean up.

Almost.

* * *

 **Later**

Two weeks. Two whole goddamn weeks at a fucking university. As close to hell as Jean was likely to manage without his Ma weeping over a headstone. Two weeks, during which time Falman taught a history seminar, Kain took classes, Breda served chips, and Jean scrubbed graffiti off the toilet basins.

If –– and it was looking to be a very big _if_ –– Jean got through this ordeal without skidding down the stairs and breaking a leg, or getting brained by some nutcase when he hit the basement, he was going to have a very long chat with General Grumman about a certain prat Flame Alchemist.

 _There_ –– the perp's shoe skidded on a puddle of water or oil, just along enough to put a hiccough in his gait. He started to turn, but before he could step away, Jean bounded the few steps between them and made a grab for the perp's collar.

At first, the man seemed quite ordinary looking. Tall-ish, dark complexion, dark hair, dark clothing, a shadow of stubble like cigarette ash clinging to his jaw, but when Jean forced himself to look into his eyes, he was unsettled by their brightness. Glittering, bottomless and opaque. A keyhole through which the world poured in and something rank and rotten leaked out. They were almost yellow in color, as though the man had a liver problem.

"I ordered you to _stop_!" snarled Jean, jamming the barrel of his pistol into the back of the man's head. The perp continued to struggle, and as he threw a hard, angry glare over one shoulder, his fractured yellow gaze fastened on Jean and held. Havoc suppressed the urge to squirm nervously.

"Let me go..." the man seethed, "I have to find it, before they take it."

"You ain't goin' nowhere, pal. Now _stop_ ," Jean gave him a good, hard shake, "your fidgeting!"

"A double negative... that was a double negative, you know. You ought to let me free, now, you see... because if I'm not going nowhere then I have to go somewhere."

Jean decided there was nothing worse than watching a crazy person saying something completely ridiculous and then to have them look at him as though _he_ was the one a shovel shy of a tool shed. "Shut up!"

"You're encoding my truths and memories, just like they are... imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that exist and don't exist, all at the same time."

"You're outta your mind."

The perp made a deep noise. "No... no no. It's just... decohesive. I'm entangled! I am so afraid of hearing voices. I think I've come to the edge... and I want to jump off..." The man inhaled and slowly let the air out. His stance softened and so did his voice: "The book..." he murmured. "It does not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within it."

He slipped and teetered precariously at the edge of the step. Jean's arm slipped around the man's torso as the Lieutenant began to pull him back up the stairs.

"I have to find it!" the perp protested, near-giddy and beginning to struggle. They staggered together in an insane, grotesque dance. "An entomological keepsake of the horizons of existence!"

Jean tried to adjust his grip. Instead of stumbling back, the man tipped forward, pulling the Lieutenant along with him. Together they tumbled down the remaining stairs. The edges dug sharply into Jean's sides as the two of them fell, and all he could see for a few seconds were flashes of gritty concrete interspersed with darkness. There was a searing pain in his head, and sparks exploded across his eyes, vanishing into a red haze. Momentarily stunned, Jean's grip faltered, and the perp wiggled free. The man vanished through the door at the foot of the stairwell.

"A direct gathering, Jean Havoc!" called the man from a distance. "Moths to the flame!"

With no small amount of effort or swearing, Jean lurched unsteadily to his feet. Even in a tilting, dizzying daze, Havoc felt a jolt in his fingertips, very nearly depressing the trigger of his sidearm and putting a bullet in the concrete wall. "How the hell do you know my name?" he demanded, breathless, not really expecting an answer but incapable of keeping the question from slipping out...

Then, out of the dark passages beyond the stairwell, rose a scream. A nightmarish wail of misery that cut at Jean's very being. A single, thin, blood-curdled shriek. In the silence that followed, it was as if the world itself was shocked; Havoc stared slack-jawed at the open doorway, horrified. He heard a slow creak from above –– Breda, in pursuit. Jean wondered, off-handedly, if he had heard the scream as well…

Jean raised the pistol to his shoulder and plowed into the basement.

Immediately, something about the huge, open space made the hairs on the back of his neck stand at attention. For one thing, the flat iron door at Jean's back, hanging open on its hinges, had a mean rectangle of glass at eye-level, the sort of thing one would see in an isolation ward or solitary cell in Central Prison. The room was still and quiet, crypt-like. The windows –– dozens of thin, horizontal slats near the ceiling –– were filmed in desiccated insects, which seemed to age the daylight coming through from outside. Unlike the warehouse floor above, the space was largely empty, save for the very middle of the room, where what looked to Jean like a makeshift laboratory had sprung up on the cold, bare concrete floor. The air smelled odd, rich with a disconcerting background aroma of chemicals which Jean found unnerving.

Benches formed a rough cordon around the instruments. Jean recognized microscopes and arc welders on the worktables, piles of sackcloth and sandy-brown tarpaulin, but the strings of tabular lightbulbs illuminated unfamiliar equipment, as well. Orbs humming with electricity. Cannibalized batteries strung into strange shapes. A device like a thick, metallic doughnut sitting on a plank go wood braced between two metal drums.

Jean noticed, warily, that, along with the folded tarpaulins, personal effects like coats and shoes and even trousers had been left lying around, as though everyone had evacuated in a hurry and somehow not thought to take their stuff with them. It was eerie.

It took a faint, fearful moan to draw Jean's attention to the cramped space between the empty oil drums, under the thick metal ring, where his perp sat huddled, head lowered, his knees pressed to his chest.

Jean couldn't stop watching the man's eyes. The yellow was surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in rats. They were the eyes of someone ancient, even if the rest of him didn't appear much older than Jean.

Havoc felt an emotion, then, that operated on a register above sheer terror. Some dog-whistle frequency, submerged until stumbled upon by accident. Like Fuery on his shortwave radios, scanning channels in his downtime and tuning them to some strange new wavelength –– the heavy whispers barely climbing above the static, voices muttering in a brutal language that people not gripped by fear could never speak.

The perp prattled wordlessly in his sing-song treble as he played with a pile of gleaming white objects arranged about him in a circle. One such object, a knobby, irregular thing like a hunk of white marble, he grasped in his right hand, and banged down noisily among the rest. The sound was less the heavy, grainy texture of stone on stone and more a light, dry scrape. Not marble, then. The man played through half closed, flame-yellow eyes. Jean stood there dumbfounded for a few long moments, staring at the spectacle, before his dazed senses finally registered the scene's full hideousness. A strangled gasp escaped him.

The stone in the man's hand was a human skull.

Jean clapped the crook of his elbow over his nose and mouth, fought the urge to be violently ill. The perp was surrounded by broken bone fragments, and the lumpen, misshapen piles Jean and his concussion had mistaken for tarpaulin or sackcloth... dry, desiccated bodies, in various states of decay and mummification. The flesh rigid along the bones, the ligaments shriveled and drawn like boiled leather.

And the belongings strewn about the floor... the gray, pockmarked shirts, the black peacoats, the belt buckles...

They were the same clothes the perp was wearing. Dozens of iterations of the same outfit, scattered amongst the bones.

"What..." Havoc swallowed, his throat suddenly as dry and dusty as the human remains on the floor. "What the hell..."

Even after his short sufferance in Ishval, where his primary responsibility had been to collect the bodies of the Amestrian dead and wounded, Jean found it difficult to put words to the smell of decomposing humans. It was dense and cloying, sweet... but not flower-sweet. Halfway between rotting fruit and rotting meat. Like someone had burned incense in an abattoir.

The perp, meanwhile, had gone deathly still. Curled in catatonic silence. He slumped against the oil drum, his strings cut, his fingers uncurling. The skull rolled out of his hand, across the floor, towards Jean's booted feet...

"Havo... is he...?"

 _Heymans_. Jean felt the Lieutenant's presence at his elbow, the latter's hand brushing the former's sleeve, a ghost of a touch. Havoc was immensely grateful for the company.

The man, their suspect, wore a look on his face that Jean had seen before... in the stares of the Ishval vets, in the shadows that tended to stray even upon Mustang and Hawkeye's staunch, strong faces: a look of vacant, hollow-eyed shock occasioned by horror way beyond a normal person's capacity to process. Harsh light from the slatted windows and the steely shine of the instruments illuminated the man's face as even his expression of terror crumpled to one of lifeless listlessness. His manic yellow gaze grew distant and opaque. Jean felt enveloped in the stare, which was not a stare, not really, but simply an act of the eyes remaining open, a reflex, reflecting everything but seeing nothing.

Jean thought furiously: their suspect. The bodies. The human remains. The same clothes, the same outfit...

Like moths that'd lost rudder control, realized Jean in an instant, thinking back to the warm summer evenings he'd spend with his Ma under the porch light. Watching the insects smack into the walls and rails, pinwheeling around the light in tighter revolutions, like suds over an open drain. If they drew too close, the moths ignited like balls of hair, curling into an oily puff of smoke.

 _Moths to the flame_.

The perp had come to the warehouse to die.

Along with all the others... all wearing the same clothes, all pilgrimaging to the same place.

"What the hell is going on here, Jean."

Havoc turned to consider his friend. Under his –– unbuttoned –– uniform jacket, Heymans's shirt was drenched with sweat and his skin had gone gray and clammy. Jean couldn't remember the last time Breda had ever looked so frightened.

Jean opened his mouth to reassure the other soldier when he heard something that chilled him to the bone:

"There are no arrays."

As Jean and Heymans glanced back over their shoulder to see who had arrived, the sight of the officer's solid, dark form struck sparks inside Havoc's chest. The irony likely would have made an impression on him under vastly different circumstances. Colonel Mustang's eyes were still bold and black, but any of the usual cool recklessness in his face and cynical humor in his mouth was long gone.

A furrow appeared between Jean's brows. The limits to his understanding of what the fuck was going on had apparently been reached and surpassed. "Colonel––"

Mustang gestured to the metal floor, bare save for the corpses and the clothes. "Whatever this is... it's not human transmutation."

Heymans's burnished green eyes darted from the ground, to Roy's face, then back to the ground again. "What makes you so sure, sir?"

"I know what to look for," he murmured enigmatically.

Jean waited for perhaps a _tiny_ bit more, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Roy's silhouette as he stalked towards the perp's body erased the kindness of him, leaving the barest sketch –– almost predatory. As the Flame Alchemist circled, Jean couldn't help but feel like some apprentice lion tamer in the ring with a disgruntled, frustrated animal, one who didn't know whether to do its tricks and receive a treat, or to simply break the rules and pounce.

Breda grunted noncommittally, a nervous habit only Havoc knew to recognize. "I guess all you alchemists must know enough about it to tell the difference, with it being the ultimate taboo n'all."

Roy crouched and rested two fingers against the underside of the perp's throat, waited for a moment, then frowned deeply. "Something like that," he muttered. Black eyes met cornflower blue and the Colonel shook his head.

Wordlessly, Havoc engaged the safety on his firearm, and reholstered it at his hip.

Breda crossed his arms over his chest. "You're the expert on the alchemy stuff, Boss. If not human transmutation, then what went on here? And why the hell are all the dead people wearing the same clothes... do we got a serial killer on our hands or something?"

Jean swallowed, feeling the nervous, hummingbird flutter of his own pulse in his throat.

"You know that old saying," said Havoc, his expression unreadable, "that you're gonna catch a lot more flies with honey than vinegar. Way I figure it, you get even more flies with corpses. Flies aren't too picky."

Roy pulled his black great coat further over his shoulders, sensitive to the chill of the basement. "Are you suggesting these people were... _lured_ here, Lieutenant?"

"I'm not sure. He was talkin' a lotta nonsense. I reckon he was a few sandwiches short of a picnic, if you catch my meaning, sir."

"Mental deterioration would certainly match his physical state," said Roy, letting out a deep sigh. "There's barely anything left of him. Skin and bones in the quite literal sense." The Colonel rose from his knees and leveled on Havoc sternly. "Did he say anything to you?"

"Right before he cracked, the perp kept muttering about tryna _find_ something. A book."

"A book," parroted Heymans.

" _It does not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within it._ That's what he said."

"Great. A right nutter, and probably a serial killer, to boot."

 _Moths to the flame_.

There was something Jean was missing, something _all of them_ were missing. Dozens of bodies... none of them exactly the same. Some stripped clean, to mere skeletons, more bloated and necrotic, and others still fully flesh and blood... like the perp from the chase. But all of them wore the same clothes, curled up in the same basement laboratory...

It was like looking in a mirror and seeing the shades of other faces looking back through the years, seeing the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway. By blood and by choice, the mysterious man had made his own ghosts.

Jean could half-imagine the suspect had been haunting himself.

Not human transmutation, perhaps, but Jean couldn't shake the suspicion that a certain science was at play, a corrupt alchemy that defied all attempts to rationalize. More a bizarre, abstract poetry than any logical or coherent mathematics.

But Jean had learned enough from Heymans to know that there are hidden meanings in mathematics, just as there are in poetry. When Jean Havoc looked at an equation in physics, blind as he was to the life underlying the symbols, the lines looked dead to him. It was only when someone truly brilliant, an alchemist like Roy, began to learn and supply the hidden text that the meaning slipped, slid, then finally leapt to life.

Many moths drawn to the same flame... or perhaps the _same_ moth. Over and over. Again and again.

An equation plotting a circle instead of a straight line.

"Could alchemy duplicate a person, sir?" wondered Jean aloud.

Roy answered absently: "With the right materials... one could fabricate a crude human simulacrum from pork, for example."

"No, sir... I mean." Jean started, then stopped, swallowed, and started again: "Could an alchemist duplicate _himself_?"

Roy shook his head and looked sidelong at Havoc, his expression caught somewhere between thoughtful and frowning. "Alchemy is a linear process, Lieutenant. To create, something of equal value must be destroyed. Alchemy's first and foremost law hinges on a mimetic reciprocity, which itself, being truly universal, shows the relativism of difference in the structure of matter. Two sides of the same coin. Creation and destruction. Heads and tails."

"Sir..." began Jean, wracking his brain for a way to render thoughts too complex and multifaceted to distill into words. "We did things the old fashioned way, back home. If a tie needed breakin' or a decision needed makin', we flipped a cenz coin. Thing is, one time, Ma tossed the thing in the air... and it landed on its edge. Neighbors all thought we were talkin' out our asses when we insisted it'd happened."

"What're you gettin' at, Havo?" asked Heymans.

Roy frowned slightly. "Are you suggesting a transmutational process might… fall on its edge?"

Jean was well aware of the fact he probably sounded like he had more than a few screws loose –– even as he watched, Heymans's face flushed with agitation, impatience and a sudden pity that made Jean want to grind his teeth to dust. "Deconstruction and reconstruction, right sir?" he pressed on stubbornly –– Ma had always said he was boneheaded. "What would happen if you put 'em on top of each other, if they didn't happen in order but at the same time––"

"If you superimposed them, you mean," offered Breda, skeptically, with an odd note of sternness in his voice.

"Yeah… both heads and tails existin' at the same time. Only this coin… this ain't a two-sided coin. What if a six-sided die could sit on every edge at once? Or a twelve-sided one? Or an object with an infinite number of sides… what would happen if the entire mess of possibilities played out at the same time?"

"The transmutation would become a cascade," said Roy, staring at Jean with an expression with which the Lieutenant was wholly unfamiliar. "The elements continue to influence and build on each other with increasing ferocity. Each of these "possibilities", or the products of the transmutations, would become entangled. The entire process would splinter reality into coupled states."

"If you're sayin' what I think you're sayin'…" His face tight with worry, Heymans pinched the bridge of his nose, "then this man, _all_ these men… are the same person?"

"It would explain the clothes, and the fact that there are all these bodies here without the military catchin' wind of any mass killings in the area."

"What the hell sort of alchemy can split one person into dozens! You can't create matter from nothing, right?"

"But it's not from nothing!" realized Jean, suddenly. "These other people were _always_ here. Just…"

 _Just... decohesive._

Heymans sighed with impatience, a certain intimation of annoyance in the sound. Jean figured his own tenuous grasp of concepts far outside his scope of his understanding had begun to irritate Breda, and having nothing to lose, the Second Lieutenant let his skepticism surface. "I'll buy Alex Armstrong turning boulders into giant busts of himself. I'll buy that nutjob Kimblee leveling whole towns out in the desert. Hell, I'll even give the Boss the benefit of the doubt when he says he recruited a goddamn twelve year old to the state alchemy program. But… pulling versions of yourself from diverging realities… Jean, that ain't alchemy. That's nonsense."

At that moment, Jean reeled as he caught sight of Mustang. The Flame Alchemist's expression held such agony and such fierce horror that it was almost enough to freeze the blood in Havoc's veins. Some of the blood had drained from Roy's face, making the dark circles under his lids more pronounced, like empty sockets where eyes ought to be.

"A book," breathed Mustang. "You said he was looking for a book, Jean."

Some unspoken disclosure seemed to be taking place inside Roy's head. It reminded Jean of the way Mustang and Hawkeye tended to communicate, without words, conveying entire conversations in a few eye twitches or some slow rolls of the head.

"Alchemists frequently write in mono-alphabetic substitution ciphers," murmured Roy. "Their notes are coded."

Jean waited for him to say something more. The silence held a hidden truth that lingered between them, written in a script he did not know how to decipher.

"If we find this book," said Heymans, "you reckon you can decode the notes, Boss?"

Jean rolled out his neck. He would murder for a cigarette. "Where do ya wanna start, Breda? The guy gave me no title, no genre… hell, not even the goddamn color of the cover."

"And this is a University," said the Colonel as a means of reluctant agreement.

"Hiding a tree in the forest and all that." Heymans shrugged. "'Sides, if this guy was _looking_ for his book before he handed in his dinner pail, then it stands to reason it's not laying around here somewhere. We got nothin' to go on."

"His secrets died with him."

Mustang let silence punctuate his statement, clearly upset at coming to his own conclusion.

Jean glanced around the basement, the bodies, not knowing how to respond to anything, not knowing what to say.

"In any case, we can't do any more down here without a crime scene investigation division of the military police," said Roy. "We have to do this by the book. After the paperwork mistake concerning those two alchemists from Resembool, Hakuro is itching to come down on us, and tampering with evidence is just the excuse he needs."

Heymans nodded. "We'd better not give him the opportunity then, sir."

Mustang's team had hit a snag. As much as he wanted to continue to dig through the remnants of the laboratory, to search the bodies, the impulse to scurry back to Eastern Headquarters with his tail between his legs was a palpable ache in Havoc's chest. The gap between the two desires filled Jean with anger and frustration.

The Lieutenant remembered the perp's bright yellow eyes, wide and unblinking… how terrified they had been. All the fear in the world, and the paranoia that came from the fear, and the hatred of the world born from the paranoia, and the loneliness that came from the hatred. All the unhappiness, all the cruelty, gathering around the man's life –– or _lives_ –– like clouds in the air, growing dark and cold and heavy until it fell like gray snow. Jean reckoned the man's world had been muffled and numb, one in which no person could hear each other or feel each other.

Even when each person was the same man.

How sad and lonely it must have been...


	5. Venus -- Copper

_|| "... Venus represents harmony, resilience, and the urge to sympathize and unite with others…" ||_

Maes Hughes ︎

* * *

 **July 9th, 1913**

* * *

"You, uh... you wanted to see me, Lieutenant-Colonel?"

Maes Hughes took a turn about the temporary "office" afforded him in Eastern Command... which looked far more like a storage room that just happened to contain a desk. A single naked lightbulb illuminated the windowless space, dim and flickering at strobe-like intervals. Every line in the room was straight, every corner sharp, and the chair behind the desk was about as comfortable as a train station bench. All four walls of the room were covered with racks and filing cabinets, leaving only a small gap for the door. The shelves looked as though they were liable to collapse at any moment under the weight of the innumerable documents and files stuffed into them. They were cheap fiberboard, better equipped for glossy magazines and cheap paperbacks than the heavy piles of military case files.

A splendid little crypt of human bureaucracy.

Maes cleared his throat and raised one hand dramatically, arm held out in front of him like some suited and booted scarecrow, gesturing his visitor through the door. "Indeed I did! Tell me, how's the clean-up going on the parade grounds?"

Heymans Breda scowled, his voice tinged with reproof. "The Big Guy and the Colonel near about leveled the place... Major Armstrong was kind enough to help us out, but we haven't seen hide nor hair of you for the past four hours, _Lieutenant-Colonel_."

Maes shrugged, then crossed to a second table in the corner of the room, upon which were stacks of books and manilla envelopes reaching head-height, threatening to teeter over. "I was busy."

"You're the one who arranged for Mustang and Ed to use the parade grounds in the first place! The least you could've done was help tidy up the place afterwards. _Sir_ ," he added purely as an afterthought.

"'A good soldier should know when to retreat,' that's what I always say. Besides..." Maes grinned. "Roy could use the exercise. He's going soft in this dusty little backwater. He ought to get himself a wife to keep him on his toes!"

"I... don't think he'd thank you for bringing up that old chestnut, sir."

"Oh? Does he already have someone in mind, perchance?"

Heymans sighed, and labored not to look annoyed. "I wouldn't know, Lieutenant-Colonel."

Maes clapped his hands, ignoring Breda's milk-curdling scowl. "Naturally." He picked a book from the top of the pile. Bound in blue leather, cracked and dry with age, the thin volume smelled faintly of pipe tobacco and mildew. The edges of the pages were brown and brittle and what remained of the book's original stitching struggled to hold them all together. "Help me out with this, will you?"

The Second Lieutenant frowned, but took the book. "With... what exactly, sir?"

"There's a reason I'm in East City, you know," extolled Maes cheerfully.

"Besides pitting Flame and Fullmetal against each other, you mean."

"Besides that. You see, Bradley has asked me to oversee a nationwide consolidation effort of military incident files as well as the collection and preservation of evidence relevant to open cases."

"That sounds tedious, sir."

"Yes," Maes agreed frankly. "But much as I hate to admit it, there's a method to the madness. Any green researcher might assume we archivists group documents together based on the topics they cover. What you'll find instead is that someone like me might send my underlings off in multiple directions to comb through sometimes unlikely and unrelated _groups_ of records. As the tangible direct traces of past activities, the records are subdivided into _series_ , and series are further subdivided into _files_. But it's not always easy to determine why records were originally organized the way they were or even where they come from. How else can we seek informative context? What happens –– and it frequently does –– if an organizational schematic is barely or no longer discernible?"

Breda shrugged. "Guesswork?"

"Guesswork," Maes finished sardonically, his dark eyebrows bunching together over deep-set, inquisitive green eyes. "And thus the issue compounds." He looked up suddenly, lens frames catching the light. "The true nature of bureaucracy, Lieutenant Breda, is made manifest by the innumerable documents, files, veneered desktops, dotted lines, and linoleum offices which convey the strict and inverse relationship between paperwork and productivity.

"Now then, in order to impose some semblance of order over the requisite chaos and entropy known as the court martial archives, Bradley needed informed judgement, a fine balance of analysis and synthesis, a good depth of general knowledge, and honed research experience."

"In other words, skills you have in abundance, Lieutenant-Colonel."

Hughes cracked a smile. "And skills _you_ have in abundance, Breda."

Heymans blinked, paused a moment, then asked: "Come again?"

"I have to admit, I was a bit peeved when Roy requested you and Falman to his division. Investigations lost two good men."

"Then why is Falman down on the parade grounds sweeping debris and whinging about his receding hairline and I'm up here?"

"Because Officer Falman can tell me the date and time and location and the color trousers the perp was wearing of any crime in the register, can summon the call number of any file in a pinch. Any bit of evidence I need, Falman can find it for me. But he can't tell me _why_ I need it. Besides, rote memorization and a reliance exclusively on the library cataloging system is what got me into this pickle in the first place."

Heymans stared at Hughes suspiciously. The red-haired Lieutenant had trained his intuition well; he trusted implicitly the small voice inside his head which told him exactly what to say, what to decide. Maes didn't think it would be accurate to describe Breda as callous or indifferent in his personality, nor paranoid in his impressions. His was a circumscribed imagination, a whip-sharp natural tendency towards trusting his instincts. And whereas most subordinate officers were humble to the point of superciliousness –– part and parcel of the brown-nosing culture the Amestrian military occasioned –– Heymans, when his dander was up, had neither the time nor the interest in deference.

Hughes found it delightfully refreshing.

"Advocating for the fight between Roy and the Big Guy," ventured Heymans, crossing his arms, "strikes me it was to keep Mustang and the others busy while you roped me into this little gig. Am I wrong, Lieutenant-Colonel?"

"You rarely are."

"You didn't answer the question, sir."

Hughes bobbed his shoulders. "And _I_ didn't tell anyone because Roy tends to get a bit possessive when it comes to his officers. When he finds good men, he likes to keep 'em."

"What?" Heymans frowned. "Do I look like Riza Hawkeye or something?"

Maes laughed. "Joke all you want, Lieutenant, but you should have seen Roy's face when Major-General Armstrong took a fancy to Jean Havoc's sniping during the joint training exercises last winter."

"Yeah, well... the Colonel ain't exactly in raptures at the best of times, wherever Armstrong is concerned."

Maes's smile turned downright mischievous. "Then let us not trouble that choleric little head of his and keep this between ourselves, yes?"

"You're as bad as he is, Hughes."

"Oh? Am I really that conniving and cavalier?"

"No, but you're really that goddamn irritating."

Touché.

"I don't see why you're in such a sour mood, Lieutenant," said Maes with mock innocence. "Surely _anything_ is better than tidying up Edward Elric's alchemy messes."

"I wasn't complaining," Breda complained.

"That so? Well, you might as well start with _that_." Maes nodded towards the thin blue book in Heymans's hands. "The filing information ought to be on the inside cover. I'll soldier on with these requisition forms from the same month."

There was a pause as Breda began his perusal. After a moment, during which time Maes parked himself on the edge of the table and lifted a water-stained manilla envelope, Heymans cleared his throat.

"Hey... Lieutenant-Colonel."

Maes halted and glanced at Roy's subordinate. Hughes expected Breda's usual brand of bland irritation to cross his features, and was completely unprepared for the man's grimace and the genuine discomfort reflected in his burnished eyes.

"Mmm?"

"This book was given to investigations by the East City military police," he supplied, shifting uncomfortably. "And it's listed in the register as evidence from a suicide."

Breda tried desperately not to show his feelings and to retain the military stiff upper lip for which he was renowned, and Maes couldn't help but feel as though, by failing to disclose the necessary information, he would be running the risk of leaving Heymans in the same distant, irritable mood as he had found him. So, Hughes provided: "Evidence of this nature tends to turn up now and again. If a soldier or an officer was in any way involved with the investigation or, heaven forbid, the incident itself, then the reports are forwarded on to us in investigations."

"Maes, this is a _children_ 's book."

With a deep sigh of resignation, the tall man closed his eyes. "We're here to organize the evidence." Maes dropped frosty caution over any hint of vulnerability in his voice, his spine stiffening fractionally. "These are _military_ case files, Lieutenant. Treasons, court martials... murders."

Hughes would be lying if he claimed the book was the first relic of a suicide he had encountered. He had seen personal effects, photographs... notes. Many soon after the conclusion of the Civil War... many more in the years that followed. For Maes, who sorrowed over each and every brutal detail as though they were sick children or starving cats, it was a point of duty to rescue what he could. From the broken pieces, he tried to recombine the crimes, the betrayals, the tragedies, the intrigues, into comprehensible paradigms of procedure that were in some cases plainly ridiculous but in others such faithful models of justice that they were all but indistinguishable from Maes's own ideals.

Heymans sighed, yanking Maes from his thoughts. The Lieutenant had mustered his staunch, stolid composure, and was turning the blue book between his hands. "I found a date," he said gruffly, "September 30th, 1910. But no names. It doesn't even look as though this book was properly bagged and logged as evidence. Someone just... threw it in the pile."

Story of my life, thought Maes in exasperation.

"One of the primary facets of suicide cases is the question of foreseeability," the Lieutenant-Colonel explained. "Whether or not the deceased person would commit suicide as a result of a potential defendant's action or inaction. In other words, was the suicide a normal result of what anyone did or did not do? Could it have been prevented?"

"But this guy was a John Doe... no names."

"And no next of kin," finished Maes grimly. "There is no further action we can take. Herein lies a case with no doubts as to the legal principles to be applied and the necessary result. Open and closed. No names, no motive, not even a note."

"Just this children's picture book." Breda grunted. "Look... it doesn't even have an author. Not exactly much to go on."

Maes allowed himself the tiniest of smiles –– he imagined he felt his photos in his breast pocket, a pulsing warmth over his heart. "Take it from me, Lieutenant," he said quietly, "children's stories have a certain magic to them. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of fists and demands for _one more_ before bedtime. Maybe that's why adults read those boring old tomes, instead, because those thick, solid things can't get out and cause trouble quite like the fairy tales can."

The book had a strange, soapy smell and made a crackling noise like fire as Heymans leafed through the pages, occasionally licking a finger or making a circumspect grunt of interest.

"It's difficult to know where to begin, sir," he admitted after a moment.

"Yes," murmured Maes, "the beginning is the tricky bit..."

He was about to say something more but he stopped, his curiosity aroused.

The author, whomever he or she was, had split the book's pages in half –– text in the bottom hemisphere, drawings in the top. Maes recognized the twisted, tattered pall of the Milky Way –– a series of tiny, precise ink dots –– with Sirius and Orion shining splendid in the corner of the page. An inversion, the stars rendered dark against the white of the paper.

He read the text, quietly, to himself:

"Tuarangi and Tāima looked down through the clouds and saw their people playing down below, and then the sisters grew very sorry and very homesick. One morning, the blue star and the red star told the girls: _If you wish to return to where you came from, we will let you down, but you must get to work and gather roots to make a rope, twisted. The two of you make coils as high as your heads when you are sitting. Two coils will be enough._ "

Near the top of the page, Orion's constellation was outlined by four bright stars at the vertices of a trapezoid. Within the space defined by the four points, seeming to draw them together into a pattern, was a row of three stars tilted at an angle: Orion's belt. Arcing downward and left from the belt was another group of lights: Canis Majoris, and with it Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky...

And then, something flickered in Maes Hughes's mind.

Two constellations. Two ropes. Two stars. Two sisters.

It was strange –– Maes's dealings with the bureaucratic back-handing of the military hierarchy had taught him that people tended to talk _numbers_ whenever they were unsure of what else to say or do. Numbers were their way of reaching out to the world. They were safe, a source of comfort.

The blue book had a great many numbers.

Maes was not by nature a suspicious person... but he _was_ intensely curious. He was no great astronomer or author, nor was he sure if all the movements and mathematics in the book were part of some coherent development, like a quilt which, despite its variegated pattern, was still a single fabric. Or if it was part of a more delicate, more subtle operation, one Maes lacked the languages necessary to translate.

But of one thing, Maes Hughes was certain: the blue book contained no ordinary children's story.

"Heymans," he said suddenly, "set it down on the table."

"Oh? Did you figure out the sorting––"

"No... but I can't measure anything with any degree of accuracy with the book balanced on your knee."

"Err... right."

Breda complied with his customary due diligence, propping the book open on the image of Sirius and Orion, using a coffee cup of pens and a heavy manilla envelope to keep the covers from snapping shut. Maes pressed his thumbnail to the rendered starscape, a vista endlessly deep in every direction pressed into the pulped paper of the page, as though by magic.

But not magic... not really...

"Alchemy," Maes muttered to himself. He didn't realize he had spoken aloud until Heymans shot a heated look at the side of the Lieutenant-Colonel's head.

"What?"

"Look at the stars," insisted Maes.

"Lieutenant-Colonel, my focus at the Academy was military strategy and my degree was in Logic and Computation. I know even less about astronomy than I do about why you're gettin' so worked up about a children's book."

"This constellation, here," Maes stabbed the page, "Alpha Canis Majoris."

Despite claims to the contrary, Heymans clearly knew enough to translate the formal designation: "The Dog Star."

"The brightest stars in the constellation form a binary system. The distance between the two is 8.6 light years and change."

"So it'd make sense for the two stars on the page to be eight centimeters apart or something," ventured Breda. He raised his eyebrows, as if he were carrying out a quick mental calculation. "Scaled down but accurate to a degree."

"Right," agreed Maes, before dropping his voice an octave... he stabbed at the constellation's intricate pattern. "Only Sirius A and Sirius B in this particular drawing are less than four centimeters apart."

Breda stuck his hands under his armpits as he argued: "This is a children's book, Lieutenant-Colonel. I ain't putting all my money on the likelihood of little kids being able to tell a difference of four centimeters."

"A fair point, Lieutenant, and one I shared at first."

"At first?"

"But then I looked at the _size_ of the stars."

Heymans opened his mouth to deliver a no-doubt sharp retort, but was silenced by Maes's manically waving hand. "Sirius A has an absolute visual magnitude of 1.42 and Sirius B, 11.18. A factor of eleven... quite a marked difference in size. But when I measured the nodes with my thumbnail, the latter was barely _twice_ the size of the former!"

"Half the size," parroted Heymans, eyebrows knitting together –– the man was incredibly sharp, marveled Maes. "Just as the distance was cut in half, so too was the visual magnitude reduced to a ratio of just two to one."

"Consider the text, Heymans! Two sisters, two stars, two ropes. All these modules are isotropic, and despite the fact that the measurements are ostensibly incorrect, the mistakes are _consistent_ , and they are related to the whole structure of the story through self-similar proportions."

"What, exactly, are you saying, sir? That this little children's book is a _code_?"

Yes. _Yes_. Even in military communiques, ciphers were difficult to crack but not ostensibly complicated. And from what little Roy had divulged on the subject, coded alchemy notes always took a narrative turn, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and often premonitory. The semantic distribution of the lists or recipes or, in this case, children's stories, _always_ diverted in some key respects from their original meaning, thus revealing their real significance.

Maes nodded in Breda's direction. "Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the author made the mistakes intentionally," he stated, almost as if it were a mathematical hypothesis. "Then it's likely the consistent visual discrepancies and patterns point to a hidden meaning in the text."

"A duality, yeah?" ventured Breda. "Every quantitative entity in the book is described in terms of twos, right? There must be some kinda objective correlative in alchemy."

"It's incredible," marveled Maes, only half-listening. "The focus on the binary isn't only extant on a textural level... but metafictionally, as well! The text itself constitutes both a children's story _and_ a secret code! Two states of being, superimposed over each other."

The Second Lieutenant froze suddenly, the motion jerky and sharp enough to draw Maes's attention. When Hughes glanced up at Heymans and found the latter's pallor as pale as new milk, the former's giddy expression dropped to concern quickly.

"Lieutenant... what's the matter?"

"What did you say just then, sir?" asked Breda with a quiet intensity.

"Eh... duality? Superposition?"

"Yeah, that. I've heard it before."

"Well, that's hardly surprising... it's hardly an uncommon––"

"Sir... the Parrish Case."

Maes frowned. He remembered the Parrish Case vividly. Roy had authorized an uncover recce at East City Polytechnic with the intent of routing out an alchemist allegedly stockpiling supplies consistent with an attempt at human transmutation.

Only the "illicit" supplies were instead being used for state-sanctioned, perfectly legal botany labs, Jean Havoc had found a basement full of bodies not far from the campus proper, and General Grumman had not pulled quite as many strings with the University as Roy had been lead to believe. Maes had been forced to finagle some clever legal defenses for the entirety of Roy's team in order to keep them from being trussed in front of a board of review. Hakuro had near about bitten Roy's head off. Breda, along with Falman, Fuery, Havoc, and Hawkeye, had been forced to turn over the case to the military police or risk demotion, or worse... a summary court martial.

Roy had always shown a lack of proper concern when it came to official mission protocol, but the Parrish Case really took the biscuit. It'd gutted Roy's team, Lieutenant Havoc especially, that they'd been unable to investigate the strange events further, but it was either abandon the investigation altogether or throw away their careers.

Mustang's bunch were brash and brazen. But they weren't stupid. Not by long chalk.

"What about the Parrish case?" asked Maes cautiously.

"Something Je–– Lieutenant Havoc said to me. About the bodies we found and the perp we tailed to the warehouse district."

"Lieutenant, General Hakuro would have your head––"

"A thing can be a thing and also not a thing."

Maes blinked. "Okay."

"Dualities. Doubles. Lieutenant-Colonel, the man we cornered was only one of many, and he was looking for a book!"

Maes could feel a knot in his stomach, the familiar hunger pang of foreboding and disquiet. "So you reckon this children's story contains alchemy notes. _His_ alchemy notes."

Heymans nodded. "And I'd bet my army pension that whatever's in there," he stabbed a meaty finger at the page, "is more than a little responsible for whatever the hell we found in that warehouse last year."

Maes grinned grimly. "Well, Lieutenant... if you have any ideas on how to decode this thing, then I'm all ears."

"I'm no alchemist, sir. 'Sides, you were the one who figured out the pattern!"

"There's figuring out a pattern, and then there's making some sense of it. Sure, we might search for clues and consistencies, only to find where the consistencies break. And it's there, in that fissure, where you'd expect to till your understanding. But alchemy..." Hughes huffed in frustration. "There isn't ever a single meaning. It's a riddle expanding continuously outwards."

Most alchemical texts were so abstruse as to be completely meaningless to him. And therein lay a fundamental disjunction between his investigative duties and the near unavoidable alchemical element in Amestrian military business. Maes dealt in details, and he suffered the loss of comprehension like a phantom-limb pain, an amputation that scrambled his mind's interpretations, starved his senses, and made even the basic ideas about the code impossible for him to fathom.

But then again, they were in no immediate hurry...

"I have an idea," stated Hughes.

"Yeah?"

Maes scooped up the book. "We stick this in the research section of the Central Library, First Branch. It ought to be safe there."

Breda's green eyes widened. "Hang on, sir... what about decoding the notes! If the whole Parrish Case was an alchemical experiment gone wrong, then the Colonel at least oughta know about it!"

"And I'm sure the _Colonel_ will be the one to explain to General Hakuro why you bunch have reopened a case he expressly forbade you from touching."

Heymans eyeballed Maes skeptically. "You mean––"

"Parrish was only last year, Lieutenant. Hide this away for a while. Wait for Hakuro to cool off. Word on the grape vine is Roy's not long for a promotion, anyway. I can take this," he waved the book for emphasis, "with me back to Central, and when Roy gets his brown-nosing behind up there, you can reopen the investigation on your own recognizance."

"Are you're certain it'll be secure, sir? There's no knowing what kinda stuff is in that book, and if it got into the wrong hands..."

Maes had seen the coroner photographs from the warehouse. He shared Breda's sentiment: whatever was in the book was not something with which to be trifled. "Short of the entire First Branch burning to the ground, it will be perfectly safe. Only state alchemists and a select few in investigations are permitted access to the research section, and they are a bit thin on the ground at the moment."

Judging by the way the Lieutenant held eye contact and risked a full four-second pause –– raising an ironic eyebrow halfway through the third second so there could be no doubt about his thoughts on the matter –– it became obvious to Maes that the prospect of returning to any kind of normal routine in light of the new developments seemed disloyal, wrong. Maes may as well have offered Heymans a fresh slap for his troubles.

"Something is happening here, sir," said Breda slowly, precisely. "And I'm hoping there's some larger truth about that man, about that book –– although I'm beginning to come to grips with the fact that the only truths that matter any more in this entire case are the ones I don't, and can't, understand."

Maes stayed quiet. He had rarely heard the usually taciturn Lieutenant so candid. He knew, then, that Breda walking away from the case had been boiled down to a conscious decision to pull free. It would take everything he had in him to do it, like an animal gnawing off a limb to escape a snare.

"Believe me when I say I don't mean this harshly, Heymans," said Maes gently, but firmly, "but this is well beyond you, now. Beyond Roy. Beyond me. After that stunt you lot pulled at Eastern Polytechnic, the top brass don't want you touching the Parrish Case. For the sake of your careers, you'll steer clear of it, and you, personally, will not mention this book or its contents to anytime until you're all well clear of Eastern Command. And that includes your teammates." Maes hesitated, then added: "I'll pull rank if I have to."

Heymans's eyes took on an abstracted look as he reflected on Hughes's words. Then, after a few seconds of silence, the Second Lieutenant nodded, deliberately, and made his steady way towards the door. Though the piles of paperwork were left largely unfinished and unsorted, Maes did not try to stop Breda's departure.

"My Da once said somethin' to me," murmured Heymans, framed by the open doorway. "Trying to justify why fightin' ain't the right thing to do in times of trouble."

Hughes stilled himself. He couldn't remember Breda _ever_ mentioning his family... not even to Roy. Hell, not even to _Jean Havoc_. It was unprecedented, and demanded every scrap of Hughes's attention.

"He said that the universe is an indivisible, dynamic whole in which energy and matter are so deeply entangled that it's impossible to consider them as independent elements. We're all the same, yeah? But what if he got the wrong meaning from it... but if, instead of people, there are many, many, many worlds branching out at each moment you make a choice. What if the future was a tangle of infinite possibilities existing simultaneously... but separate, so you ain't ever gonna see them or touch 'em.

"And what if an alchemist managed to... _collapse_ the possibilities?"

"What if one man became superpositive," finished Hughes, his words little louder than a sigh, a suspicion that was sharp as a blade cutting through him. "How many of you would exist?"

"A million. A million million. The Colonel called it a _cascade_. You called it duality, Hughes, but consider _multiple_ dualities. If you double two, then double four, and keep doublin' the product, well...

"You're gonna wind up with infinity awful fast."

In the stunned silence that followed, a starry ache lifted Maes up and above his dusty little corner office, allowed him to consider the immenseity of what Heymans was suggesting. There was a plunge in Hughes's gut encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea, a vertiginous lurch, as though he was staring over the edge of a cliff, looking into a crevasse with no bottom.

"Could alchemy do that?" Hughes wondered aloud.

Not turning around, Breda offered a noncommittal shrug.

"Alchemy already did."


	6. The Sun -- Gold

_I realized I accidentally replaced Chapter 2 with Chapter 3 from_ An Ocean on their Shoulders _, so I fixed that! My apologies! - Hoopy_

* * *

 _|| "... the Sun is esoterically symbolic of the mind and the self that is expressed outwardly…" ||_

The Mission

* * *

 **The Week of October 17th, 1912**

* * *

It was the third week of October, a rainy Thursday, a generous few degrees above freezing, and some absolute twat in University administration had decided that what the custodial staff of Eastern Polytechnic really needed were daytime hours to supplement the evening shifts.

Jean Havoc was not so much sweeping the floor as raking it, throwing himself into the task with the frustrated energy of someone dragging a comb through tangled, matted hair.

Colonel Roy Mustang's officers had been working undercover at the East City Polytechnic University for a little under two weeks, trying to find the person whom the Colonel believed to be responsible for planning an attempt at human transmutation. Warrant Officer Falman had fallen in with the faculty, taking over for a history professor on sudden "sabbatical"; Kain Fuery had enrolled as a transfer student; meanwhile, Jean and Heymans Breda had swallowed their pride and endured their relegation to cooking and custodial duties. Roy's suspicion hinged on a report made by Lieutenant-Colonel Hughes regarding several inordinately large shipments of materials containing high quantities of silicon, lime, carbon, and ammonia –– key ingredients in the chemical composition of human beings. Despite Amestris's recent efforts to consolidate export firms and implement unilateral quality standards in all chemical products, the shipments picked up by Hughes were both unregistered and untraceable, nor was their original buyer known. The interception had occurred less than two city blocks from the main campus of Eastern Polytechnic, hence the undercover mission to unmask the buyer and put a stop to any illicit alchemy experiments before they happened.

Simple. Straightforward. Uncomplicated. The peticulars of his disguise and the necessary loitering around a school didn't endear themselves to Jean Havoc to any great degree, but as his Ma used to say, one never made an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

But then again, omelets tended to taste like right shit when they ended up littered with eggshells.

Jean supposed the entire mission had gone tits up when one of the nuttier members of Falman's colleagues, one Professor Parrish, had admitted to an entire ensemble of the faculty that he had decided to implement a farm-to-table initiative in the University mess using his own herb garden.

His own fucking herb garden, thought Jean to himself, tasting the bitter dirt of disappointment gritting under his teeth. An agricultural project large enough to feed an entire student body. With seeds planted in fertilizer-rich soil, grown in mason jars, and stored under heat lamps.

Fertilizer, mason jars, heat lamps. Ammonia, soda-silica glass, and moissanite superconductors.

 _That_ solved the mystery of Roy's "human transmutation" fright real quick.

Hadn't he voiced the possibility at the time? thought Jean furiously. Hadn't Havoc goddamn said to the team that the ingredients were common amongst planters? Of course he had. And had they listened to him? Of course they bloody hadn't.

Parrish's silly little side project ought to have signaled the end of the whole thing. But _no_... Falman had had a _hunch_. Let's continue to observe, he said. Something feels off about the staff, he said. Nevermind the shipments and materials had been identified and accounted for. Nevermind Jean was slowly going batshit insane dealing with stuffed-shirt, sneering students and swobbing floors. Jean didn't really know what Falman was looking for, and Havoc had the sneaking suspcicion that even _Falman himself_ didn't know, moved as he was solely by the desire for the entire mission –– which the Warrant Officer proposed! –– not to seem like an incredible waste of time.

All Jean took away from the state of affairs was that he was gonna be railroaded into yet another week of suds and slippery floors and abject misery. The new shifts and daytime hours, if possible, just made everything that much worse… at least working the night shift had given Jean the chance to debrief and reconvene with Breda and the others. Out in the open, in broad daylight, they couldn't risk looking too comfortable with each other's company, and what little information was exchanged was always brief and fleeting and heavily coded.

Jean glared at nothing in particular as a torrent of students flooded from the study halls. Most skirted well around Jean's mess; others occasionally stepped in stray piles of dust and detritus and hastily apologized.

And some, still, went out of their way to scruff Jean's hard work in every which direction, snickering the entire time.

Havoc tried to ignore the fact that one boy - some baby-faced toerag with a pinched, rattish smirk and curly blonde hair, like Heaven's only fuck-ugly cherub - had paused midstride, taking the time to saunter up and grin at the Second Lieutenant.

Jean _really_ tried.

That had been one of the only gratifying things about custodial work –– the workers themselves tended to pass overlooked, like tadpoles under the surface of tepid water. But every now and again, Jean thought glumly, a sudden jerk in motion made a ripple. And then the pond scum took notice.

"You missed a spot," sneered the student.

How bloody original, thought Jean venomously. He paused his sweeping and held the length of the broom in both hands, widening his eyes in mock surprise.

"Oh yeah, you're right," agreed Jean with syrupy saccharine politeness. "I seem to have a little grease spot right in front of me, looking godawful on my nice clean floors."

Toerag reddened to the temples. "Listen here, you––"

"Don't you got somewhere to be? Some class to cut or some professor's fanny to kiss?"

Toerag's shoulders straightened and his head reared back. Jean's hold on the broom tightened –– it wasn't as comforting as his military-issue bolt action rifle, but it was a sight better than a grungy mop and certainly more threatening than a feather duster.

"You can't speak to me that way, you're just the help! I'll have your job for this––"

Then Toerag took a menacing step forward, stepped in a pile of dust bunnies, and promptly slipped and fell onto his backside.

It was so pathetic it wasn't even worth the laugh.

Havoc adjusted his grip and started sweeping again as Toerag struggled back to his feet, red-cheeked, just shy of steam coming out of his ears. Jean's crooked grin tugged at his cheek.

"You think this is funny?" the bastard snarled. "My father is a general in the Amestrian military!"

On any other occasion, that _might_ have made Havoc reconsider. As it stood, he didn't give a damn.

"That first one was a warning," Havoc told him, shoving the broom into Toerag's face. "Next time I'll bash your teeth in."

The little snot-nosed prat sneered. "You're just the janitor."

Havoc bristled. "Groundskeeper."

"Isn't that like a janitor?"

"No, it's like a groundskeeper." Jean sighed. "What's your name, kid?"

"My name is Jin! Jin Ha––"

"Listen, Jin... I don't really give a crap who your dad is or why you get off by taking the piss outta the staff, but you keep goin' like you are and one day you're gonna annoy a guy who's packing more than just a broom and floor polish. Real life's nasty. It's cruel. It doesn't give a shit about you or your family. You'd best start being nice to it, 'cause I promise it ain't gonna be nice to you."

Jean expected him to scoff at best, or at worst... throw punches. The kid's lips twitched and Havoc steeled himself for a fight, but then Toerag smiled, the denigration in the gesture almost familiar, even as he turned from Havoc and walked away. Jean watched the kid's back receding down the long, gleaming hall, until he turned a corner and disappeared.

* * *

 **Later**

The dining halls had expelled the energetic swarm of youthful humanity, and the din of footsteps and laughter had long since settled into stillness. Heymans Breda sat at a far corner table and tucked into his lunch –– a vegetable stew which should have given any person not lacking in taste-buds pause for thought. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, Breda's stint in the mess halls of Eastern Command had completely numbed his sense of taste, and he munched on his raw potatoes and lukewarm broth without allowing himself the opportunity to think very hard about what he was eating.

He heard rather than saw Havoc stomp up to his table. Heymans could feel the enmity and resentment radiating from Havo like a bad smell, as potent as the collective stench of lemon disinfectant on their work overalls.

"You wanna talk about it?" asked Breda benignly, spearing a carrot.

Havoc set his tray down on the table harder than perhaps was necessary, the metal clattering, his stew sloshing over the side of the bowl.

"There's nothing to talk about. Nothing happened."

"And 'nothing' makes you bite my head off every time I raise the issue." Breda tipped his own bowl, mopping up the dregs with a biscuit. "I get we're supposed to be uncover n'all, but that don't mean we can't talk to each other, help each other out."

"It's not a problem."

"Well then, what is? You gotta face like a wet weekend. Tell me what's got you so fidgety, and I'll see if I can help."

"It's nothing, Heymans!" snapped Jean. "Stop fussin'."

Yeah right. It was hard _not_ to fuss about Jean Havoc, because trying not to worry reminded Heymans that he _should_ be worried. Jean wore his heart on his sleeve; a vast majority of the time, it was all the rest of them could do to get Havo to shuddup. Heymans was ill-accustomed to his best friend acting so... reserved and uncommunicative. It went beyond being a little tight-lipped... his entire being seemed fixated on someone or something other than himself. Havoc was a shell –– his energy had been depleted, and he couldn't tell Heymans what he was feeling and thinking because Jean himself didn't _know_.

His focus was not on himself anymore.

Heymans suspected the reason why, of course. Soldiering had been Jean's chance to make a clean breast of things before going off into the world on his lonesome. Jean had destination addiction, of that much Heymans was certain, but life at the Academy had provided no positive outlets. Faced with school, his best friend floundered in the problem of everything suddenly becoming so vague: the once-clear path to his simpler past cluttered and impassable, the future as confused and impenetrable as the past itself. Jean had been caught in one long, sustained, intolerable present, during which time Heymans's best friend became convinced that the so-called best years of his life were never going to happen.

In his early days at the Academy, Heymans had been too green to realize winning debates, even private ones, would lose him friends. So Breda did not press the issue, and instead gave the man he'd come to think of as a brother a level-eyed stare, keeping his mouth shut. Remaining still and silent and indifferent, just as he always was. Heymans Breda, allergic to human affection. Repulsed by the degrading feeling of touch. Just because Breda tended to lose patience with social ritual, just because he could not abide the fleeting shallow encounters and small talk of many social gatherings, people thought him heartless.

But Heymans didn't care about people. He cared about Jean Havoc.

The blonde Second Lieutenant tilted his head to the side, causing his mop of blonde hair to fall in a fringe over a single miserable blue eye.

"How much longer are we gonna have to do this?" muttered Jean, pushing his potatoes in circles instead of eating them.

"Dunno... until we got our evidence, I guess."

Jean made little effort to hide how gloriously annoyed he was at the prospect. "And how long is _that_ gonna take? You heard that gray maypole... he's gotta _hunch_ , Heymans. We're gonna be stuck here until the sun burns out of the goddamn sky while we wait for him to watch imaginary grass grow."

"This is his mission, Havo. Roy gave the Warrant Officer leave to act on his own self-motivation."

"Meanwhile we're up to our eyeballs in dirt and detergent and _he_ gets to prance around doing what he does best... lecturing people!"

Breda nodded, looking tired, then noted: "It could be worse."

" _How_."

"You could be up there with Fuery, havin' to listen to him natter on six hours a week." The horror and indignation of Jean's expression grew until Heymans hurriedly retracted the suggestion. "And in any case... one of the Professors who's gone and gotten Falman's dander up is giving some big lecture tomorrow afternoon... something that'll _change how mankind regards his place in God's kingdom_. Or something. Now I dunno about you, but that smacks of heretical alchemy nonsense to me."

" _All_ alchemy is nonsense to me," muttered Jean glumly. "It's absolute crap. How the hell Roy makes hide nor hair of it, I don't know. No wonder the guy is in such a piss poor mood all the time."

"Pots and kettles, Jean."

"Huh?"

"Nothin'." Heymans elbowed Havoc good-naturedly. "Look, once Falman gets outta lecture, we'll regroup. Figure somethin' out. I'm about as keen on this place as you are, Havo, and the sooner we're back to getting our butts handed to us by Hawkeye, the better."

Jean gave Breda a look of ironic inquiry. "You're eager for her to go through your desk again and knick all your ashtrays?"

"Most of us don't have that problem." Heymans shrugged evasively. "'Sides... Riza likes me more, anyway."

"You're so full of shit."

"Nah... just stew."

"Yeah, 'cause you like to walk outta a meal with enough gas to open a service station."

"And you ain't pretty enough to be as stupid as you are, Jean, but you don't hear me whining about it."

"If I wanted to hear from an asshole, Heymans, I'd fart."

Despite his change in mood, Havoc was still wearing a look that Breda found odd and upsetting –– an amusement that didn't seem to pass beyond the surface of his features, as though he found everything in the world both infinitely funny and infinitely depressing all at the same time.

"Eat your grub, Havo," said Heymans quietly, "We got work to do..."

* * *

 **Later**

"It ought to be noted that political borders have become highly salient objects in research during the last ten to 15 years or so. This has not been merely a coincidental change in academic winds, but has been related to major social and political transformations occurring across the Amestrian geopolitical landscape."

Vato Falman –– or, as all save six knew him, Professor Bishop –– stood before a crowded lecture theater wearing a black trench-coat-style blazer that hung to his thighs, gray tweed trousers, a dark vest, a skinny red tie, and a black pin-striped dress shirt. Were it not for his perpetually puzzled expression, the Warrant Officer liked to think he would have cut quite a dashing figure.

Still, as he glanced down at his waistcoat and jacket, Vato felt a most uncharacteristic confident swagger possess him. His spine lengthened, and his shoulders retracted. The present circumstances had done their level best to make the whole mission as disagreeable as possible, but damn it all if teaching didn't give Falman some level bearings. At times, being under the stress of the stakeout was like being stranded in the middle of the ocean. If he panicked, the water was liable to rush into his lungs and create further distress. Yet, by immersing himself in the controlled, collected environs of the lecture hall, he had, quite without his expecting it, remained afloat with relative ease.

Perhaps Falman had missed his true calling... he was consumed in education's image –– if not in its full usage, thanks to his alias.

Even so, he was guiltily aware that he had appropriated his persona as a purely indulgent object, a temporary reprieve from the stresses of soldiering.

With that depressing thought, he continued the lecture...

"The collapse of the rigid geopolitical divide between Southern and Central Amestris at the cessation of the First Southern Border Skirmish of 1835 and the accelerating rate of imperialized globalization –– whether related to economics, culture, conflict, consciousness or all of these –– were the principal macro-level backgrounds to the ongoing campaign with Aerugo."

In the front row, the head of a certain dark-haired, bright-eyed "student" snapped off his shoulder as he jerked awake. His eyes peeled open, glazed with the remnants of a dream. Falman continued the lecture, frowning, and trying not to sound as annoyed as he felt...

"To say Amestris's geopolitical landscape is complex is to sell the matter entirely short. It ought to be noted, however, that such features as the southern regional town of Fotset and the conflict regarding its sovereignty serves to characterize more broadly the key issues related to borders... namely, their selective openness. This also implies that some local borders were more meaningful than others in the construction of previous nationwide dichotomies."

Students began to gather their books, the low murmur of papers being packed away and coats being donned filtering down from the upper tiers of the lecture hall. Falman's gaze dropped to his planner.

"On my desk by this time next week," he commanded, "two pages on the cultural, political and economic dividing lines extant in Amestrian iconography, with particular emphasis on the Aerugonian conflict."

Most students departed with muttered acknowledgements despite their suddenly sour expressions.

One, however, elected to groan. Loudly.

Said student buried his head between his crossed arms, face-down on the desk, and made a muffled noise that sounded suspiciously like a sob.

Falman huffed a breath and began to pack his lecture notes away in a briefcase. To his complete lack of surprise and complete surfeit of frustration, a morose Kain Fuery remained behind after the rest of the students had dispersed.

"I don't have to do that paper, right sir?" he ventured... the fervent hope in his voice almost pitiable.

Vato let out a deep, slow sigh through the nose. "Of course you do... if everyone else in the tutorial completed the assignment save you, it might very well arouse suspicion."

"Have pity on me, Warrant Officer!" cried Kain, briefly forgetting to wallow in tears and self-pity –– or use their code names. "You're the fifth professor to give me an assignment in the last two days!"

"That's how university _works_. You do... well, work. Besides the fact, in falling asleep while I was talking, as your friend, you've hurt my feelings. As your commanding officer, you've insulted me. And as someone with a working brain, you've made me wonder if you've taken leave of every one of your senses."

"Sir!" protested Fuery, going pink with shame. "I'm being run off my feet. I haven't slept a wink in half a week!"

"Regardless, dozing off in class is liable to attract the wrong sort of attention, and the last thing the Colonel needs is one of his operatives landing himself in a student disciplinary hearing."

"But I'm not a student!" he whined.

"And we can't let anyone else know that."

The puzzlement and even a mild frustration were clear in Kain's tone. "But sir," said the Master Sergeant, "we _found_ the suspicious ingredients... in the botany laboratories, managed by Professor Parrish. There aren't any other signs of human transmutation... so why are we still here?"

"Call it a gut feeling, Kain."

Fuery raised his eyebrows ruefully, betraying something of his doubt. Falman supposed he ought to count himself fortunate –– where Kain communicated a silent, stubborn uncertainty, Jean Havoc had shouted and very nearly whacked Falman upside the head with a wet mop. Even the scowl of the usually-taciturn Breda had traveled a few degrees further south.

But Falman's was a feeling he could not quite shake: a stabbing, hairy prickle, like a furry spider stuck to the back of his neck. Perhaps what accounted for the Team's frustration was the fact that a lurch of instinct was a sensation wholly alien to Falman: Vato was a pragmatic man –– he examined assumptions, appraised sources, discerned hidden values, evaluated evidence, and assessed conclusions. A "gut feeling" tended to spell either paranoia or indigestion... it was poor form for a theory's viability to be evaluated on a hunch. Only one standard was ever relevant: the ability to explain or predict pertinent phenomena.

But the frequent pain in Falman's stomach had increased in intensity. The fatigue was more or less constant. The lethargy came in part from the near-continual cognitive analysis going on inside his head, an almost imperceptible, subconscious cataloging of verbal and nonverbal behaviors exhibited by members of the University's faculty... two in particular. So bizarre were their mannerisms and conduct that they were beginning to coalesce into an overt advertisement of their deception. What was once a hunch had, to Falman, transmuted into a quantifiable, replicable set of tools used to distinguish truth from fallacy.

"Something is going on here, Master Sergeant," murmured Falman, more to himself than to Fuery. "I just need a little longer to find out what."

Kain's kindly, sympathetic look annoyed Vato and broke his heart in equal measure –– the boy was so compassionate it was nigh-on unnatural. "I trust you, sir," he affirmed, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "And I'll... I'll write that paper..."

Falman cracked a tiny smile. "Talk to Breda... I'm fairly certain the textbooks reference his Academy thesis on the subject."

Fuery tapped his head, as if dislodging chunks of information. "Oh! Oh, of course! Thank you, Warr–– _Professor_." The small, bespectacled soldier-turned-student dashed up the aisle towards the back of the lecture theater, disappearing through the door as Falman gathered the remainder of his materials, looking forward to his lunch with Havoc and Breda––

"This is the second time this week I've noted young Mr. Paune's absence from my lecture, only to find him in your company, Professor Bishop."

Oh, _pants_.

It seemed as though his tuna sandwich was doomed to go uneaten. Falman gave his notes a despairing grimace before turning his attention to his unwelcome visitor.

It took a great deal to get on Vato Falman's wick. Tenured Professor of anthropology, occupant of the office adjacent to Falman's, and insufferable thorn-in-the-flesh Lendel Bates managed it with aplomb.

The man padded towards the lectern, a strange hop in his step like a vulture sidling up to a carcass. He had a few inches on Vato, standing almost two full meters tall, cutting a cold, ascetic figure, rail-thin and strikingly gaunt. His cap of slate gray hair reminded Vato a little of himself, if he had aged 20 years and spent the vast majority of them scowling down the length of a long, hooked nose. Professor Bates's expression was halfway between impatience and irritation, his amber eyes lingering on Falman with an insulting contempt.

"I'm sorry to hear that, Professor."

"Should I be concerned?"

"Kain is in my earlier lecture. Since I have _another_ lecture immediately after his, he tends to stay for both sections in order to catch me with questions at the beginning of my office hours."

"At the cost of missing my class in the meanwhile, Professor Bishop. His marks are beginning to slip."

"With respect, Professor, Mr. Paune's academic standing is not mine to monitor."

The sneer vanished from Bates's face; the smirk that lit his eyes was one of charmed amusement, which was almost worse. "Perhaps it would be prudent to tell _him_ that, Professor? As he seems rather convinced the time spent in your company is directly proportional to any quantifiable uptick in his academic standing."

Falman frowned. "If you're suggesting I'm giving Mr. Paune unfair preferential treatment, then you're sorely mistaken."

Bates's pale eyebrows turned up ever so slightly. "Then you shan't begrudge my giving your star pupil a supplementary quiz? Just to ensure he isn't _too_ terribly behind on my material."

"What you do in your classroom is your prerogative."

"And I trust you won't..." Bates lifted a single shoulder as he pretended to bandy the consideration back and forth... " _warn_ the boy beforehand?"

Vato swallowed. "No, of course not..."

Bates gave Falman a smile that wasn't really a smile at all. "Professor Bishop, I'll be plain with you. Your interference in my lessons is bad for discipline, and more than a little irritating besides. I've heard that your own history courses run remarkably smoothly. Why can't you let others get on with their work as we let you get on with yours?"

"I..." Vato lowered his head. "I don't know. I'm sorry if I caused any trouble. I'll try not to meddle."

"That's the spirit. I admire a man who knows when he's wrong."

Bates stirred Falman's guts the way a spoon stirred a cup of cocoa, down to the depths of his soul. As Vato hugged his briefcase to his chest and stepped down from the stage, Bates gave him an assessing look out of his lacquered amber eyes, which Falman tried and failed to ignore. The back of the Warrant Officer's neck prickled as Bates's gaze tracked him out of the lecture theater.

Two of the faculty set Falman ill at ease. One was Lendel Bates.

The other was...

* * *

 **Later**

"Professor Parrish?" wondered Breda aloud. "You mean plant man?"

"Something about him seems... off," insisted Falman. "Have you ever gotten the feeling that a person is too perfect? The way a fish sees a bright, shiny lure just before it gets hauled out of the water to become someone's lunch?"

"No."

Breda knew Jean was in a belligerent mood without even having to speak to him. Actually, he hadn't _dared_ speak to him since their break in the mess, for fear of throwing a proverbial red flag to a metaphorical bull.

Evidently, Falman had no such intuition.

"You look terrible," said the Warrant Officer.

Jean scowled. "This is from a guy who has all the sex appeal of a penguin." He paused a moment, perhaps to relish the felicity of his own wit –– and Falman's look of affronted indignation. "I realize you may be jealous that nature didn't deal you the same chiseled hand it dealt me, but that's no reason to––"

"It wasn't my intention to insult you, sir!" said Falman, mildly irritated. "I merely noted you seemed unwell... ill. Are you sleeping at all?"

Jean, sitting bleary-eyed and unshaven, shirt buttons done up in the wrong holes, crossed his arms and huffed: "I'm fine! And even if I wasn't, _Professor_ , even Hawkeye'd blow her top after two weeks pissin' away our time and energy chasing after your _hunch_."

Heymans elected to interject before the two erupted into unholy bickering... again.

"I gotta hand it to Lieutenant Havoc, Vato, Parrish seems pretty harmless. Nice. Sure, it's his stupid botany project that got us stuck here in the first place, but being a nutty academic is as common as an old boot 'round these parts."

"I get Bates," grunted Havoc. "Guy makes my stomach flip. But what's got you so cock-eyed about Parrish?"

"It's the way he speaks," argued the Warrant Officer, loosening his tie before falling into one of the empty chairs, lanky frame near-spilling over the armrests. "As though he's disclosing a deep secret without _really_ revealing anything. You know... keeping us preoccupied with a single leaf in order that we won't see the tree."

Breda considered. "You reckon he's hidin' something?"

"I couldn't say, sir. He reminds me..." Falman squirmed, picking at a loose thread in the upholstery in an effort to avoid eye-contact, "well... he reminds me a bit of the Colonel, in a way."

"The _brilliant leader and eccentric thinker_ way or the _brown-nosing glory hound who don't deserve to be half as handsome as he is_ way?"

"Both––hold on... you think the Colonel is handsome?"

Breda lifted a lazy eyebrow. "Just 'cause I'm on a diet don't mean I can't admire the menu."

"Why does everything come back to _food_ with you?" muttered Jean, still glaring at nothing.

Falman blinked in only partial comprehension. "Anyway," he said, slowly. "It's the way Parrish tends to _think_ instead of talk. Suppose, for a moment, that people believe things are not real unless they are spoken, that it's the uttering of something, not the thinking of it, which legitimizes it."

"Okay," Breda nodded, "I follow."

"With Parrish, it's just the opposite, sir –– as though he believes that thoughts are at their most genuine when _thought_ , that expressing them distorts or dilutes them, that if they're released into the air and light they will be affected in a way which alters them, like film accidentally exposed. The way the Colonel will oft give us a monosyllabic answer to questions that beg a million responses."

"All scientist types are a little insane, Vato, alchemist or no. Some are cold blooded killers and some are harmless eccentrics, but the best of the breed exhibit both of these characteristics from time to time. That's ordinary crazy. My question is whether or not Parrish has done something _out_ of the ordinary that's got your knickers in a twist."

Falman frowned at the choice of words, but pressed on: "That's just it, sir, a widespread meticulous consistency causes a bigger suspicion than the most obvious inconsistency does. I think Parrish is up to something." The Warrant Officer looked around the room with an expression of solemn caution. "He's giving a public lecture tomorrow... and I intend to be there."

At that moment, a small, staggering figure flung open the door to the break room and trudged towards the assembled officers on heavy feet.

"Bates failed me!" whined Kain, putting on a prodigious pout, which would have been funny if he didn't look so goddamn miserable. He waved a hand and very nearly upended a half-eaten box of greasy flatbread. For what must have been the first time in his short, stubbornly upbeat life, Fuery fixed Falman with a dagger-like glare. "He said _you_ gave him the idea, Warrant Officer."

Heymans could have sworn Jean bit right through the filter of his cigarette. "Falman did _what?_ " Three pairs of angry stares swiveled towards Falman, who at that moment looked as though he wished the carpet would open up and swallow him.

"It wasn't anything personal, Kain," he protested. "And I certainly didn't _give_ him the idea. His course is a difficult one, and Professor Bates expressed concern over your standing in class... I shouldn't think your mark reflected your effort."

"That course is difficult," slurred Fuery, eyes beginning to shutter shut, "in the same way getting the Lieutenant and the Colonel to admit they like each other is difficult."

"You said, difficult, Fuery, not impossible," grunted Breda. "'Sides, it's not as though your academic record means anything in the long run."

"Failing still sucks," muttered Jean, poison in the words. "Would it've killed you to cut the kid a break, Falman? The least you could've done was warn him."

"Well... yes, obviously, but-"

"Then get that stick out of your ass and help him out a little!"

" _But..."_ Vato looked positively scandalized, "not only would playing favorites arouse suspicion and put Fuery's cover in jeopardy, it would constitute a blatant breach of academic conduct!"

"None of it _matters_ anyway," Breda continued to harp on the point, even his prodigious patience wearing thin. "And for the love of god, Kain, it ain't worth gettin' absolutely shit-faced over. How much have you had?"

Fuery opened one eye and blinked confusedly. He muttered something that may have been a number, or a name... or some noun in another language entirely. They couldn't really tell.

"Regardless, _failing don't matter_ is easy for you two to say," barked Havoc, stabbing his unlit cigarette at Heymans and then Vato. "You eggheads probably never earned anything less than perfect marks a day in your lives! Breda here finished in the top spot back at the Academy."

Heymans sighed, mockingly wistful, knowing it would annoy Jean. "Ah, the Academy... those were the days, huh Havo? Leaving home for the first time…the parties…"

Falman frowned. "What about the tutorials, the lectures, the large building with all the books called the 'library'?"

"Is that what those were?" Breda replied blithely. "Didn't need 'em, and the stacks smelled like ham."

"I never learned how to study properly," moaned Fuery, face-first into his eggy flatbread. Reminiscence oozed from him like runny yolk: "Mum was always scolding me 'cause I wanted to work on my radios instead of doing homework... I never had good marks... I didn't get accepted to school... I'm such a disappointment."

"Your egg is dribbling down your front, Fuery," said Breda, about as warm and fuzzy as the granite tabletop pressed to Kain's forehead.

"You're all heart, Lieutenant," he sobbed.

"And you're falling-down drunk." Heymans looked around. "Out with it, kid... how many did you have?"

Havoc padded around the table towards the open doorway, immediately outside of which sat a rubbish bin. He moved a second flatbread box from the top of the container –– evidently, Fuery was a hungry drunk –– and stared, open-mouthed, at the refuse in the bin.

"Fuery, there are two bottles of beer in here."

The Master Sergeant nodded glumly. "I know it was irresponsible, sir, but I just couldn't-"

"Nah, Kain, you don't see what I'm gettin' at. _Two_ beers?"

Breda blinked. "You got completely hammered on two beers, Fuery?"

"... yes?"

He grunted. "After this is over, remind me to drop Havoc as a drinking buddy. You're far more economical. 'Sides, Jean's no more fun drunk than sober, anyhow."

"I hate you," groused Havoc.

"No you don't."

"Getting back to the point," urged Falman. "I intend to sit in on Parrish's lecture tomorrow, and I had hoped the rest of you would accompany me."

"So we can settle once and for all that you're blowin' smoke out your ass?"

"So we can determine whether or not Professor Parrish's research warrants suspicion," corrected Falman, eyes pinching in a scowl.

Heymans, seemingly oblivious to the enmity stirring between his two friends, bobbed his shoulders in a shrug. "I ain't got anything better to do. What's the lecture about, then?"

Falman took a deep breath. "The title of the talk is _Te Toi o Ngā Rangi_ , which means _The Twelfth Heaven_ in Parrish's mother tongue.

"And the lecture is about quantum physics."

* * *

 **Later**

"One need not be an alchemist to understand that death cannot be cheated. But there are endless ways that life can be lived."

On the stage, Professor Parrish bent over the lectern, his fingers swift and sure as he sorted through his notes, his dark, curly hair gleaming under the spotlight. Jean Havoc glanced around at the audience, watching their faces, mildly surprised by how captivated they were by the speaker, as though at any moment they expected him to start doing summersaults. Summersaults would have been a sight more interesting than a lecture on a topic Jean wouldn't know how to spell let alone understand, but kept the thought to himself.

After some initial nerves, Parrish's confidence grew, his voice deepened in tone and became firmer and louder. The audience listened, rapt. Also watching with approval from the front row was Falman, his whole attention turned towards the speaker.

"A comprehension of the nature of the quantum world predicates upon the simple fact that human sense is not to be trusted. And yet, the belief that all science proceeds from observation to theory is still so widely and so firmly held that my critique of it is often met with incredulity. I argue that observation is always selective. It needs a chosen subject, a point of view, a reference frame. Empirical science constitutes a framework derived from a logical construction of sense-data. However, where quantum mechanics is concerned, there is a wholly a priori principle by which unknown entities cannot be inferred by virtue of observation. On the contrary, observation in quantum physics is a distortive factor, experimentation, corruptive. It is therefore necessary to find some ontological way of bridging the gulf between the world of quantum physics and the world of sense, and it is this problem which will occupy us in the present lecture..."

Parrish's talk turned from qualitative and quantitative until Jean found he could no longer follow the mathematics; bored, he allowed his mind to wander. His gaze swept across the lecture theater until it alighted on his three friends in succession: Falman, pinioned to his chair and riveted by the presentation. Fuery, as white as a sheet and looking about as lost as Jean felt. And to Jean's left, Heymans, who wore a strange expression of introspection, his eyebrows knotted, his mouth pursed in a thin, down-curved line, as though he was not paying attention to Parrish's lecture so much as Parrish himself. As the Professor broke out a stick of chalk and began to calculate quantum spins on the blackboard, Jean's keen blue eyes finally fell to the lecturer himself.

He was not at all what Havoc had expected. Parrish was dressed in a black shirt, black trousers, with a thin silver necklace that flashed against his dark complexion. His sleeves were pushed up his forearms, and Jean could see his muscles working as he tallied sums. He was tall and lean, with brown eyes so light and bright they were closer to yellow. He was young, too... though his voice carried a certain weight and gravitas indicative of experience, he couldn't have been much old than Jean himself.

Breda caught Havoc's attention, the former shifting in the corner of the latter's eye. Heymans puffed up his chest and stared Parrish down with a scowl that would have sent most people running for the hills.

Jean leaned in close. "What's the matter?"

"I'm not sure yet," Heymans mouthed back. "But Falman might be onto somethin'."

"A bad somethin'?"

Heymans's cheek began to twitch and move strangely. "No... a familiar somethin'."

Jean turned to look at his friend properly, then. Anxiety pulled the creases of Heymans's face taut, his unease dogged but just subtle enough to be almost unconscious. He shifted his weight from foot to foot without comment. Familiar, Heymans had said, but not the deja vu familiar of passing a random stranger on the street and, against all probability, seeing the face a second time. Heymans's complete silence and concentration, his sudden desperation to _remember_ , suggested a knowledge far more intimate. The ache of homesickness, or the longing for a warm meal or craving a fire's warmth after snow –– or wanting back something he should never have given away.

"Heymans..." began Jean, suddenly concerned.

"Shh!" came an exasperated voice from close by. Breda's mouth pursed shut and, after a moment's consideration, so did Jean's. Both soldiers returned their attentions to the lecture.

"So how does this all address our original ontological paradox?" queried Professor Parrish to no one in particular. "It is a simple fact of existence that human beings are entities confined to a world held captive by the illusion of linear time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerful causative past and an infinitely distant future. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We believe, therefore, that there never was, is, nor will be any experience other than present experience, any version of reality save our own. This is fundamentally untrue.

"There are many, _many_ worlds branching out at each moment you make a choice. This thesis lies at the heart of quantum entanglement. Before a decision –– whether as small as choosing an apple or an orange for breakfast or as momentous as proposing to your beloved –– our lives appear to be in peculiar, multivalued superpositive states, and it is only after the moment of choice that we find a single, well-defined reality.

"What if it were possible to be aware of all these superpositive states at once? To inhabit them, to control them, to _exist_ in and as them across the infinite gradations of time and space. In such a paradigm, linear time –– that is, chronological time, or the isomorphic, unidirectional relationship between cause and effect –– would not exist. A human being as a superpositive entity would view in direct comprehension a universe not only unbound by the arbitrary divisions of past and future, but free from the confines of choice, of regret. All decisions made simultaneously, all futures lived simultaneously, all possibilities realized. The alchemists have the right idea, ladies and gentlemen... death cannot be undone. Consequence cannot be contested. But perhaps... there exist realities where it does not have to be. And we can make those realities... well, a reality!"

Havoc knew everyone was entitled to acting a little dim every once in a while, but damn... listening to Parrish yammer on, Jean knew he himself must have really abused the privilege. What on earth was the guy talking about...?

"Thank you for coming today. I will not be taking questions, although I urge you to direct any inquiries to my department in writing."

Jean and Heymans exchanged a glance. As the students and faculty funneled out of the back of the lecture theater, and Professor Parrish scurried off-stage with his notes in hand, the two soldiers made their slow and laborious way to where Falman and Fuery sat in the front row, fighting against the flow of the crowd.

Kain turned in his seat upon their approach. His face was in shadow, chin tucked towards his chest, and Jean couldn't quite make out the expression on the kid's face.

"Come on, F–– Mr. Paune. I figure Falman wants to ask Parrish some questions and I ain't keen on sticking around longer than I have to."

"Correct," corroborated Vato. "Sooner rather than later, I think, before Professor Parrish's office gets bombarded."

"Hold on... just... just for a minute."

Jean found his gaze dropping towards Kain. Concern colored Havoc's words when he found the youngest member of the Team curled into himself, knuckles white on his knees. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. I just... I don't want to go into it just yet. I just want to sit and not have to think about..." He swallowed.

Even in the half-dark, the motion seemed painful, Fuery's Adam's apple laboring against a catch in his throat.

Breda's eyebrows arched in alarm. "Damn kid, you look as though you've seen a ghost."

Fuery stared up at Heymans, his face pale, his eyes wider than Jean'd ever seen them, watery and terrified. "I... I think I have."

Heymans leaned closer to inspect Kain and then looked up at the other two men. "I knew something smelled stink about Parrish," he muttered.

"As did I," agreed Falman. "Though... I can't say I know what has Kain in such a state."

Fuery looked towards the closed door of the lecture stage, in the direction Parrish had gone, which could not have assumed a more sinister aspect if there had been blood seeping out from under it in a steady flow.

Falman and Breda exchanged a look. The former silently mouthed a question: What's wrong with him?

In reply, the latter merely shrugged.

"Come on, Kain, what's going on?" pressed Jean, trying to mask his sudden worry and unease with mock impatience. "Don't tell me you're still hung up about that mark Bates gave you."

Fuery had never weathered doubt or criticism well; the notion that someone might be upset with him had always been too much to bear. His emotions would skitter out of control, making it nearly impossible to articulate his thoughts. "Sir, I... I've seen that man before."

"Parrish? Yeah, I mean, you _are_ a student here n'all. You probably spotted him comin' outta––"

"No, sir, you don't understand." Fuery loosed a shuddering breath, and a small, whimpering noise came out of him –– a sob.

They all watched Kain with tense, concerned looks.

"Professor Parrish's name is Noel," he whispered hoarsely. "And last year, I watched him jump off the East City Bridge.

"That man is dead."

* * *

 **Later**

Falman's office was an uninspired slate gray, the floor-to-ceiling window facing the campus green the only splash of color in the entire room. On the desk sat a styrofoam coffee cup, a notebook lying open, and reams of term papers stacked under a prism paperweight. There were no curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf behind Falman's desk lay piled on the floor. Fuery glanced at the titles on the shelf and found a book on Xingese mythology next to a book of poetry, which was flanked by a book on anti-realist philosophy.

"How are these organized, sir?" queried Kain.

"They're not."

Fuery turned to him. "How do you find anything? You must have a hundred books."

"I like the search, Master Sergeant. It's like visiting old friends."

Ironic, thought Fuery, a little sadly; for someone so solicitous of his solitude...

Outside the window, a flock of sparrows wheeled through the air, looking more like a flying net than seventy conscious individuals, a black veil thrown on the wind. When one sparrow dodged, the whole net swerved and dipped: a mass of one mind. Kain remained half-distracted by their flight as he made for a small side table beside Falman's desk, where sat a campus directory next to an old rotary phone. Kain picked up the headset.

"Forgive me for saying so, but this whole thing strikes me as more than a little morally questionable," said Vato, giving a sharp scowl of disapproval, his eyes narrowing to mere slits.

"You mentioned once that Professor Bates's office was directly adjacent to yours, sir. If what you say is true, and Parrish and Bates are meeting this afternoon, then this could be our chance to prove they're up to something."

"They're having a coffee... they're not talking on the phone."

Kain looked suddenly sheepish. "I may have, ah... snuck next door and taken Professor Bates's receiver off its cradle."

"I... see."

"In older ringer telephones," explained Kain patiently, "it's possible to eavesdrop on other conversations. Since the coil of the ringer mechanism is hooked directly to the phone line, the coil and hammer can be used as a microphone. When someone in the room talks, the hammer vibrates, inducing a current in the coil."

Falman raised his sparse eyebrows. "You're frighteningly adept at this, Sergeant," he noted with a tentative frown.

Color rose to Fuery's cheeks, making his face warm. "Part of the job, sir."

Kain had become quite an expert, he thought, at listening –– at sitting in on other people's lives while they talked around him, oblivious to his presence. Even when he wasn't strictly on the clock, Kain had a terrible weakness for collecting snatches of conversation. It was less a pang of hunger and more a sapping thirst, a compulsion fundamental to his very being. Kain Fuery listened the way the starved earth drank the rain –– sucking up every precious drop.

It wasn't as though he was desperate for the company –– Fuery didn't necessarily consider loneliness to be an inherently bad or unconstructive condition. But there were times when the wish for other people's voices, the sound of other lives and other selves, injected some fluid mixture of greed into the solvent of Fuery's mind. He could endure solitude. He couldn't bear silence.

Even as he set up the microphone on Falman's phone, Kain listened to the ambient hum of the university –– the nervous system of the building, the pipes carrying electricity and gas and water as though impelled by some capillary reflex. He heard the tarpaulin on the balcony crunching in the cold wind; the two short clicks in the wall before the radiator rattled to life; the murmur of voices from students passing outside. Kain listened to it all, the constant, the rhythmic, the random.

Kain liked to think there was a point and purpose to his obsession with sound... one Colonel Mustang had intuited at the time he requested Fuery to his small, select detail of officers. The right combination of circumstances had enabled him to listen, to observe, and consequently, Kain believed that there were unexpected, constant repetitions in human behavior. Scenes were repeated in life, just as they were in a radio drama. An endless variation on a theme. There was a pattern to it all, a paradox predicated on predictability coupled with individuality. Every voice, every person, was different, and yet invariably the voices all tended to resonate along the same narrow frequency when heard in concert.

Perhaps that was the reason why Kain found himself uniquely receptive to Professor Parrish's lecture about particles and possibilities. Thanks to his background in electrical engineering, Fuery knew that light was both a wave and a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of quantum physics indicated fortuity and chance, and yet Kain didn't find it any more difficult to live with the consummate paradox of a stochastic universe of randomness and a universe of pattern and purpose than he did with light as a wave and light as a particle. Contradiction was nothing new to Kain Fuery.

He heard a click on the line, breaking him from his reverie. Pressing a finger to his lips, Kain waved Falman closer. Both men bent their heads close to the receiver...

They could hear Parrish's benign, patient smile in his words: "Perhaps not," said the Professor, in response to something his companion had said to him. "But then again, the alchemists have been whispering about bringing dead people back to life for as long as alchemy has existed in this country, using organic chemistry and advanced bioengineering to reconstitute a human being from basic matter. Perhaps the key to resurrection lies not in building, but in borrowing."

Uh oh.

Falman and Fuery exchanged a look. It may have been the light of his austere office, but Vato's complexion suddenly seemed a few shades paler than usual. Gray and pasty, like his hair. Fuery tapped his earlobe and pointed at the receiver.

"You are no alchemist, Parrish." Lendel Bates's sneering voice was unmistakable. He favored his colleague with a strange tone of voice. Amusement? Condescension? Whatever it was, Fuery didn't like it one jot. There was something about Professor Bates which brought on a sort of hermeneutic unease.

"I've dabbled."

"Have you indeed? And what of equivalent exchange, eh? If you are, as you say, substituting the reconstruction phase of the transmutation with a _borrowing_ phase... borrowing from _where_ , exactly?"

"From possibilities unrealized, futures unborn, roads untaken!" enthused Professor Parrish. "Every moment we blink, Professor Bates, every moment we _breathe_ , we collapse a superposition, splitting our half-lidded realities from our stares, our suffocations from our sighs. We are itinerants floating along a decohesion, itching to break out of our singular existences. Or, at least, to communicate with the worlds of what might have been.

"Our lives can be likened to the wave particle duality of light, Professor Bates," said Parrish. "Are you familiar?"

Kain felt a peculiar sense of understanding... his earlier considerations stuttering and hiccoughing in his mind, as though he had been, for a few seconds, remembering his own future. For the first time, he saw a medley of haphazard coincidences fall into line and order, the moments rearranging themselves into a precise, remarkable intersection.

"Yes," said Bates. "Light undergoes diffraction and causes interference as waves, but light also acts as point-like masses and electric charges."

Kain could imagine Parrish –– _Noel_ , Fuery affirmed to himself –– shaking his head vigorously. "Quite. So too does a single life appear to be a strictly linear sequence when considered in retrospect, one event proceeding the next. In truth, life is a quantum entity. Always, there are variations on our lives we may never reach but that could so easily be ours if only we knew how to find them. Certain events may not necessarily happen in our reality, but the alternate version is just as real as the one we live by. In fact, the difference between the two is merely a matter of perspective. There is no meaningful way to tell which is real and which is reflection, as if there are two displays, above and below, going on simultaneously.

"Like the page of a book before the turning... there is a miraculous feeling of the story being there, as of yet unrealized, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible."

Professor Bates took a deep, slow breath. Kain thought he was making a valiant effort to remain stoic, but his tone betrayed the long-suffering exasperation of someone who had to listen to something patently idiotic. He lowered his voice: "You remind of the swallow who once every thousand years transferred a grain of wheat, in the hope of rearing a mountain to reach the moon. You're obstinate in transporting your wheat and you derive a certain exhilaration from the sneers of the bystanders, I think."

The other Professor insisted: "What if one were to want to hunt for these unrealized realities, Bates? Wanted to make them a reality? You can't just rummage around like you're at a yard sale. You have to listen. You have to pay attention. There are certain things you can't look at directly. You need to trick them into revealing themselves."

"So how, exactly, do you intend to do that?"

Noel Parrish took a deep breath, fast, then let it out over the next seven seconds. "I intend to transmute myself," he stated. "My calculations of quantum decoherence predict apparent wave function collapse, since a superposition has formed between the quantum system's state and the environment's state, between me in this reality and the versions of me in other worlds."

Bates sounded as disbelieving as Fuery felt. "How in the Theoi's name do you intend to do this with _alchemy_? This is madness…"

"The equations mapping superpositive variables are quadratically integrable functions for which the integral of the square of the absolute value is finite... in a closed system, the law of equivalent exchange holds. I have designed the array and have a location prepared in the quay straith... an old industrial warehouse along the East River."

Kain fought to stifle a small, sardonic smile. Why was it always warehouses? He reckoned that someone at some point had decreed that all clandestine meetings must be held in one. Woe to the criminal who lived in a city thriving with commerce, with no empty warehouses to be found. He probably needed to build one, just to have a place to arrange late-night meetings and secret alchemical experiments.

Professor Bates released a decidedly uncouth snort. "And people begrudge me _my_ eccentricities."

"Lendel––"

"I want nothing to do with you or your ravings, Parrish. I always knew that you had perhaps more than a few bats in the belfry, but I can't attribute this sort of talk to academic curiosity or even your usual brand of foibles. This is _dangerous_... and I have no intention of invoking the military's ire should word of your alchemical crimes against the Gods be made a matter of public record!"

Fuery and Falman heard footsteps, the muffled furrowing of a fist on the shoulder of a jacket... and then the slam of a door. Bates, expelling Parrish from his office.

Despite the abrupt ending to the conversation, Parrish's admission left little to the imagination. It seemed Colonel Mustang's reports –– and Falman's suspicions –– had been proven correct: Noel Parrish was planning an alchemical procedure aimed at unraveling reality as Kain understood it.

Fuery replaced the receiver and looked at Falman. "An abandoned warehouse near the East River waterfront, sir."

Vato bobbed his head. "I'll contact Colonel Mustang at Eastern Command. With General Grumman's approval, we can cordon off the area, start conducting searches. It may take a while to get Hakuro's approval, since the military police fall under his jurisdiction… I only pray we are not too late."

Noel hadn't provided a time table, realized Fuery. He could be planning his experiment two weeks in the future or the very same night. There was no way to tell…

"In the meantime," pressed Kain, trying to remain positive, "I'll find Lieutenants Havoc and Breda. I'm sure they'll be happy to be going home, Warrant Officer."

The pair stood and prepared to go their separate ways, when a sudden thought stilled Falman's departure midstride. Fuery only noticed when Vato cleared his throat conspicuously, skinny neck beginning to twitch.

"Kain," he said, quietly, his narrow eyes shining, his face solemn, "if the man who jumped from the East City Bridge two years ago is the same man at this University, planning an experiment that could turn his own body into a quantum superposition, do you think..."

"There's a possibility he succeeds in his efforts, since we've already seen him in the past?"

"Yes. He said, during the lecture, that the divisions of time are completely arbitrary to quantum entities. What if we are doomed to fail in this venture, Kain, because we have already seen the consequences of that same failure?"

"I..." Fuery swallowed, his mouth suddenly bone dry. His chest rose with a quick inhale. "I dunno if we can predict the future that readily, sir," he admitted. A ray of weak, watery sunlight spilled through the window and gathered in Falman's crystal paperweight, throwing slivers of rainbow across the office. Kain studied the colors carefully as they shifted on the creaking wooded furniture, the sunlight splintered by the glass's lateral faces. "But this is different. This is using knowledge already gained about the world to guess at the most likely outcome."

"It constitutes a causal paradox, Kain," argued Falman, his mouth drawn in a straight line. "If Parrish is in the past, then he was _always_ in the past before."

"We're helpless to stop this..." murmured Kain, a queasy, vertiginous lurch in his stomach.

For the first time since he had watched Noel take the jump, almost two years before, Fuery felt weak, woozy, stupid –– and soul-crushingly human. A very small, very powerless human. It was as though, in undertaking the mission at Eastern Polytechnic, they had leapt off a precipice and with the intent of knitting themselves parachutes on the way down.

The past was dead and decided. The future was resignation, fatality, and could only end one way. And all Kain Fuery felt in the present was numbness, that he could do nothing, stop nothing… that events were destined to play out as Kain knew they already had. Noel would be fractured - whether by virtue of the experiment or because of an alchemical rebound, Kain couldn't say - and a million, million versions of the same man would exist simultaneously in all moments of time and space. Doomed to live out every choice, every mistake, every intention, every iteration.

Kain felt his helplessness like anesthesia needled into his heart.

Like a story without sense, a text without translation.

And a code that could not be broken.


	7. The Moon -- Silver

_Author's Note:_ _This ended up being quite a bit longer than a week-long project. Par for course, I suppose._

 _This is in part because of some major lid flipping going on in my personal life –– moving to a new town, starting my Ph.D., contending with fear and loneliness the likes of which I haven't known for a long while. It's evident, looking back on it, how much of The Dog Stars was my bearing my heart to my readers. My anxieties, my fears, my arrogance, my pride, my failures... it's all in there somewhere. My life is confusing and scary and desperately lonely –– but for as long as I can remember, I have had an easier time of it contending with physics, with science, then the subtleties of the human condition. Perhaps this is why quantum mechanics features so prominently in this project... because it is a branch of science that instills in me a tremendous sense of agency, of weight and consequence. We can change the future by virtue of our decisions. We are each a universe of potentials unto ourselves._

 _Writing this has been like bleeding poison from a wound. I am still frightened, am still sad and anxious, but... I don't think I'm so lonely anymore, because I got to share the journey with all of you, in some roundabout way. So... thank you._

 _Please enjoy this final installment! And if you have any questions (this story was a bit dense), please feel free to hop on over to my ask box on Tumblr._

* * *

 _|| "... the Moon represents clarity, persistence, and subtle strength_ _…" ||_

The Infinite

* * *

 **April 21st, 1915  
Five Days after The Promised Day**

* * *

"Dammit."

Roy Mustang heard the book –– in brail, a gift from Denny Brosch on behalf of his retinopathic sister –– hit the floor with a heavy _whumph_. Roy dangled a hand over the side of his cot, stretching his fingers to reach the ground, before a searing pain ruptured the middle of his palm. He was forced to retract the arm, biting his lip to keep from crying out. With Riza undergoing yet another transfusion in the trauma ward, Roy consigned himself to letting the book lay there, just beyond his reach, until someone returned.

Roy's increasing cognizance of his own handicap provided the only moments of excitement in what was otherwise a very dull, very protracted hospital stay. He had never been a clumsy or careless man, and this new awkwardness in movement and coordination bothered him in some regards _more_ than the loss of his actual sight. He tended to tangle his intravenous lines or misplace the oxygen tubes, knock over styrofoam cups and spill water all over the floor. Though his body ached with tiredness, the blackness during the night was so terrifying in its intensity, so impenetrable in its density and mass, that Roy found sleep difficult if not altogether impossible. In the morning, often eating took considerable extra time. Since he couldn't see his food, he resigned himself to groping with a fork or spoon until half his breakfast was scattered over the bedsheets. In the small adjacent lavatory, he would fumble with the bowl of lather and cut himself with the razorblade. If indignity had a scent, it was the rust-metal smell of blood from a knick on his chin or cheek.

Roy had been assured that blindness wouldn't be painful, though he might experience _complications_ , a term beloved of doctors that seemed to be a metonym for any sort of struggle they couldn't quite frame in medical terms.

Propped up in his cot, his back against the metal headboard, his hands swathed in bandages and thus robbed of their dexterity, Roy figured the doctors could not have immobilized him more thoroughly short of trussing him up in an old fashioned stockade.

Bereft of company or distraction, Roy turned his head towards the door. In the absence of his eyes, sound had taken on a three-dimensional property as well as a texture as tactile and stimulating as the scratchy bedsheets under Roy's fingertips. The sound of Central General in the wake of the Promised Day was a mouthful of tart bites –– clean, fresh waves of sound occasionally stained by the gummy viscosity of bodies and bleeding and injury. Women and men in scrubs swept up and down the hallway outside, checking monitors and carrying bags of fluid –– Roy could hear the beeping of the machines, the stretch of silicon. Nurses changed shifts, moved the life of the place along while patients and visitors waited frozen, locked in their little cells of concern and fear. Every now and again –– too frequently for Roy's fancy –– he heard someone being carted off, the nurses's voices dropping to low murmurs, the machines silent, an errant wail, perhaps, from a despairing friend or family member. He could picture in his mind's eye –– ironic, how vivid his imagination had become –– the dead bodies like lumps of matter no longer of any use, making it hideously plain how closely hospitals in a crisis tended to resemble factories.

There was a light knock outside. Roy's head jerked up like a shot. The door hinged open, the bottom scraping where there was a slight rise in the floor –– Roy had tripped on it often enough to know.

The movement of the figure into the room pushed the air towards Roy, and he took an ample sniff, tasting on his tongue the hospital's tepid coffee, the snarled scent of wool, and underneath... plums, flowers. It made him think of freshly-laundered silk and linen dresses, shawls.

Not Riza, then. After the battle, Riza carried with her the heavy walnut stock of her rifle, gun solvent, cordite... hot iron, from the blood on her clothes. In the office, she smelled of ink and paper, of the perfume of binding, string, and glue. The scent of knowledge. Information. Thoughts and ideas. Poetry and love. All of it bound into one person...

"Colonel... you have a visitor."

Maria Ross. Armstrong's shift must have ended. Roy looked in the general direction of the door, his head tracking the sound of footsteps, a small delay as he followed the echoes left in their wake. "Who is it, Lieutenant?"

He heard her heels click. "Sir! A gentleman with a local charity, working in conjunction with the hospital. I've checked him for weapons and arrays, Colonel."

Roy wasn't _really_ in the mood for guests, regardless of how public-spirited their motives. He was tired and sore and his struggle with the book of brail had left him irritable. Still... a part of him was acutely aware that, in light of his lack of sight, his ambitions hung in a delicate balancing act, perched on the edge of a knife. Bereft of his ability to _see_ anything, Roy supposed he ought to compensate for the fact by playing to his other strengths. One of them, as Breda and the others delighted in reminding him, was kissing the right arses and charming the right ears. A man working with a charity organization might not be a bad ally to have.

Especially if the day ever came when _campaigning_ became something of a necessity, mused Roy to himself. The prospect cheered him somewhat.

"Show him in, Ross."

"Right, sir."

A skittery tread replaced Ross's steady, sure one as the young woman resumed her vigilant watch outside the room. Roy didn't worry so much for his safety –– he trusted Maria's judgement in that regard –– so much as how thick he'd have to lay it on to win the philanthropist's favor. Roy took a deep breath, held it, then let it out slowly. The first thing that occurred to him was that the stranger smelled... well, strange. The syrup of lilies hung thick and sweet in the air, like ashes and incense, rain and dirt, something not dissimilar to rosin. It was the smell Roy associated with movements and music. The scent of time signatures.

"Hello, Colonel. How are you feeling?"

What a redundant question, thought Roy resentfully, cogitating on the deep ache in his hands, a smarting pain in the back of his eyeballs. Sarcasm was one of the many services he offered to those who made stupid inquiries... but he found, in that moment, he didn't have the energy to say something biting.

"About as well as you might expect," said Roy cautiously, deliberately. "Though... I imagine I'd feel better if I knew who was asking."

"My apologies, sir. I'm with an organization that raises money for primary care physicians and nurse practitioners in the Amestrian hospital system. One of our volunteer initiatives looks to donate new and lightly used books to patients."

The stranger had a good, strong voice. He smiled with his voice, too, though it had a certain incipient darkness to it, as well: a low, mature, barrel-aged-gin richness. It gave Roy pause. Though his instincts may not have been as sharp as Riza's own –– and indeed, he doubted she'd ever let him live down the fact he'd waltzed into a room full of hostile generals proclaiming Führer Bradley a homunculus –– he suspected it was not only his remaining physical senses that had been sharpened due to his absence of vision. Sight, he lacked. His _in_ sight, however, seized on something in the stranger's voice, in his scent, his _being._ Though the words were deep and soft, the inflection in them was not a sound so much as a reverberation, deep in Roy's sternum. It reminded the Colonel of roots sucking at the earth, and the pale, sightless creatures that lived below the ground.

There was something... _off_ about the man, something diseased at his core, cracked and flaking like foliose lichen.

"The hospital staff clearly weren't very helpful, were they?" murmured Roy, gesturing vaguely to his face. "I'm afraid a book isn't going to do a great deal of good here."

"Your eyesight. I see." The man sucked air through his nose. "Apologies, Colonel... I did not intend the flippancy."

Roy sighed. "There are two boys down the hall... brothers. Perhaps they would be more receptive to your services." He thought for a moment. "Though I would keep a tight hand on your supply if I were you. The Elrics tend to devour books the way you and I devour breakfast."

The stranger chuckled. "I shall endeavor to bear that in mind." Then, after a moment: "As it so happens, Colonel Mustang, I only have one book left, and I had every intention of giving it to you."

Again, Roy couldn't shake the vaguest sense of misgiving, a premonition with texture and heft, something he could almost taste. It suddenly occurred to him that the man, who had not yet given his name, had timed his arrival such that it coincided with Riza's absence...

"Who are you?" barked Roy, no longer a question but a demand.

"A friend," he said. "A tourist, I suppose."

"That's not an answer."

"Colonel, if I intended you harm, I doubt the young lady outside the door would give me the chance."

Strangely, Roy suspected he was telling the truth. Despite the unease churning in his guts, the Flame Alchemist sensed nothing of ill-intent, neither heard nor smelled anything to suggest deception or violence –– no scent of sweat or sound of labored breathing. It seemed as though the man, whoever he was, wanted to do exactly what he said he wanted to do: give Roy a book. And Mustang felt the stranger's insistence like the heat of the noonday sun on his face, a turgid warmth, a lingering impression.

And yet... Roy remained beset by the presentiment that there was still some additional factor at play he had failed to take into account. Just as standing in the warmth of the noonday sun left little doubt of its presence, its brightness concurrently wiped away the stars and the planets, making them invisible to human eyes. If one needed the darkness in order to see the night sky, perhaps daylight in of itself was a form of blindness.

Roy, of course, didn't see the stranger move to drop the book on his bedsheets, but he felt the weight of it landing on his thighs. It wasn't particularly heavy. Roy reached out a hand and found an old, worn spine, strings exploding from either end. An embittered, aggrieved part of Roy's mind he wasn't entirely fond of wondered, cruelly, whose spine was in worse shape... the book's or Jean Havoc's.

It was tempting in that moment to sit back and make finger-steeples and invent clever-sounding and sarcastic justifications for the stranger's odd behavior, but Roy had the sneaking suspicion that the man would sniff out the horseshit. "What use have I for a children's book?" asked Roy instead, intuiting the genre from the thinness of the volume and the linen texture of the cover.

Roy imagined the man's shrug. "That's not for me to decide, sir. I recovered this particular work in a used bookstore in North City, left there, the attendant told me, by a Second Lieutenant recalled suddenly to Central and in desperate need of pocket change. An undignified end for such a compelling text, I thought, so I rescued it.

"And it just so happens that I... _we_ , have been searching for this book for a long time. Thinking, perhaps, that it could do what we could not, and put things back together again." The stranger chuckled, the sound vinegar-bitter. "We were wrong."

Roy scowled, gimlet-eyed. But the word slipped out before he could stop himself: "Why."

"A simple matter of entropy, Colonel. The science of things falling apart. From one perspective, it is the universe's only way of distinguishing the past from the future. We do not live in a vacuous, uncreated space. Decisions, once set in motion, have far-reaching consequences, and mistakes, once made, cannot be undone. I think, perhaps, you are aware of this."

Roy said nothing. He squirmed, wilting under the glare of unexpected scrutiny; it was like meandering through an art museum, glancing at the figures in a painting, when suddenly, no longer absorbed in their own concerns, they looked up out of the canvas and _back_ at him.

"Because you are one who keeps his own secrets, and takes his punishments in silence, I think it is fitting to leave this," a light scrap of a fingernail on the book's cover, "with you."

"I can't damn well read it," muttered Roy. His voice was hoarse, the words low and fast and faintly guttural. His eyes didn't move, but a trace of a frown curled his lips.

"You have a great many pairs of working eyes to read it for you. And if the years have taught me one thing, Flame Alchemist, it's that those who care are always scarce. You ought to cherish them. Those who _genuinely_ care; not the acquaintances, false friends, or those with similar aspirations. Those few who actively seek your company... and always," here, Roy heard a definite smile in the stranger's words, "that one soul who would plainly step off the edge of the world for you."

Without his sight, and weighted under hints and implications, sound slowed to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame, filling an eternity. Little things –– a cricket on a stem outside the window, the trolley wheels squeaking in the hallway, the stranger's occasional deep sigh –– all seemed magnified, brought from the background in achingly clear focus.

Roy felt a disturbance just beyond the physical world his eyes could no longer perceive...

 _You need my alchemy._

 _And I need the Lieutenant to be my eyes..._

The memory ripped through him with breathtaking keenness –– _a blade flashing in the darkness_ –– and though Roy tried to stow himself against the emotions dragged in its wake, he couldn't prevent the physical grimace that accompanied that damned image of her lying there, so pale, almost translucent... as though her bones were made of glass, as though her skin would tear beneath his fingertips if he applied too much pressure. So much blood from such a fine tear, narrow but devastatingly deep, as though she'd been garroted with razor wire rather than stabbed.

He felt pain, then... an ache worse than his shredded hands and his sightless eyes. Pain for an intimacy never acknowledged, pain for a friendship nearly gone. Pain for the prospect of a loss Roy knew he couldn't possibly endure, and how perilously close he had come to its realization...

"I never much cared for children's books," some distant part of Roy murmured. "Everyone in them tells small lies, except for the author, who tells big ones."

"The Truth is a tricky thing, Colonel."

Roy had an inkling of _that_ particular polemic.

"It's a tacit fact of writing that deception is necessary. One must never have too many truthful things in a storybook. Otherwise the tale would be boring, or heartbreaking, and no one would want to read it. It must still tell _a_ truth, but it must be layered, encrypted. Coded."

"And what makes you think I _want_ to read this... or have it read to me? Not all books received as gifts are transformative. Sometimes the only thing a book gives its reader is a paper cut."

"True. But one can't get a paper cut without first turning a page."

Roy opened his mouth to say something, but the stranger beat him to the punch.

"The young lady outside mentioned your men, and your Lieutenant, would be returning shortly. I won't keep you from them, Colonel."

Something of Roy's frosty suspicion impelled the stranger to depart without pause. The movement was all one flash to the blind Flame Alchemist –– the man's final words, the weight of the picture book on Roy's lap, a distant bow made evident by the crushed crease of a jacket –– before, finally, a lingering absence, the click of the closing door.

Roy sank back into the headboard, and for a few moments sat like a ruminative monk, while half a dozen images and emotions hurried through his mind, playing out with the blurred spin of a perforated film in a kinetoscope. Confusion came first, then indignation, then queasiness. He wondered, vaguely, if there was a word for a type of _foreboding_ that worked in the opposite direction. Instead of fearing the future, Roy could not shake the feeling that something awful had already come to pass. He just could not put his finger on _what_... aside from the obvious, he corrected himself bitterly, waving a hand in front of his face.

Roy's mind turned to thoughts of afterimages, apparitions... ghosts, in spite of his alchemist's mind fervently rejecting the implication. The stranger had known Roy Mustang –– his friends, his ambitions, his secrets –– with a frightening degree of intimacy, as though they had been acquainted in another life. The man left an impression as palpable as the book on Roy's lap, the weight of something enormous and unspoken between too-thin pages.

Before, Roy could have searched for his answers in the lines and furrows of the man's face. The stranger's expression would have held explanations for his every thought, his every suffering, joy, heartbreak. Roy only had to open his eyes and _observe_...

But, of course, he couldn't. Roy Mustang had been blinded by the Truth, and as the stranger took his leave, the Flame Alchemist saw nothing.

And in that moment, his punishment was neither a penance meted out for his hubris nor a lesson conferred for his humility. It was ugly and tangled, stupid and confusing. How he hated it. Tired, aching, and in the last place he wanted to be. Alone.

"Hey, Boss! Falman brought those books you asked for!"

Until, suddenly, he wasn't.

Roy could have recognized them all by touch, by smell, by the way their breaths came and their feet struck the ground. Kain Fuery, a small, flighty presence, a scorch of electricity, like a burnt kernels of wheat. Vato Falman, padding across the floor slowly and carefully, carrying with him, along with his books, the fragrances of cut wood, poppy-seed bread, and the soft crispness of snow, Briggs already seeping into his blood. Heymans Breda stepped a little slower, the earthy, salty, evergreen scent of him wafting gradually into the room, intermingling with the nutty, sourish odor of camphor so characteristic of hospitals. Heymans took his time, leading someone...

 _There_... steeped in the smell of old roses, hesitant with memories of a bloodied throat, the clean brittleness of linen bandages –– despite the antiseptic quality of it, in that moment, Roy didn't think there was any scent so wholesome, nor any fragrance so penetrating and restorative. In defiance of the devastating injury, she was able to make her way to her cot without too much difficulty.

"What was the verdict, Lieutenant?" asked Roy immediately, as he heard Heymans puff her pillow.

"There wasn't enough blood left for the autologous transfusion they had originally intended, sir," said Riza Hawkeye, a mite gruffly.

"Class Three hemorrhage, Boss," said Breda, uncharacteristically grim. "Upwards of a loss of forty percent of her total blood volume. You'd be hard-pressed to give her a prick test in her state."

A muscle in Roy's jaw fired. "Were they able to find a donor match?"

"The reserve of A-Positive is far from ample at the moment, sir," admitted Riza. She sounded terribly tired. "But... they performed the transfusion with what little supply was available."

"It is a small wonder you were able to remain conscious for as long as you did, Lieutenant," murmured Falman.

Roy heard the crunch of her starchy hospital gown as she settled back into her cot, a grunt of pain turning to a sigh of relief at being off her feet. "I had a job to do," said Riza simply, the words whispy on her small exhalation of breath.

A ripple of conversation ran around the room, dim and distant to Roy's ears despite the fact that the three officers stood less than a few feet away. His attention was on his adjutant as she struggled to get comfortable, occasionally letting slip a strangled hiss as her movement tugged at the tenuous scab across her throat.

Words –– perhaps a confession –– Roy knew he would regret trembled on his lips, but he clenched his jaw around them.

It was strange, he thought, how emotion, though invisible, seemed to impress itself so potently and surely onto the inside of his skull. Without his eyes to aid him –– or rather, his vision to distract him –– he found in his imagination a dazzling visual correlative to the desperate compassion he felt for Riza Hawkeye. It was only one of a few times in Roy's life he knew the meaning of that rare thing, tenderness. A quality different from respect or even distant affection... the sentiments he reserved for the rest of his team. It was like washing a whisky glass in the sink only for his soapy hands to slip and the glass to shatter and puncture his skin. Blood on his hands. Blood on her throat. There was a sudden shocking red on the inside of Roy's eyelids, so vibrant it buzzed.

Parallel to tenderness and compassion were their cataracts of cruelty and pain. Though she never professed to peddling in solutions or cures to their misery and despondency, against what was, perhaps, better reason, Riza Hawkeye had chosen rather to bleed Roy's pain from him, remain silent with him in his moments of despair, stay with him in those long hours of grief and bereavement that seemed to have no end.

She faced with him the reality of their shared suffering.

Over the course of their history, Roy had made the occasional spasmodic effort to quash the affections he felt for her, but being stripped of his sight had resurrected that old, juvenile feeling of weakness, a sort of powerlessness, as though he were about to disintegrate, his sense and sanity crumbling as easily as a soda cracker. The emotional nausea –– a strict consequence, Roy knew, of having guarded himself for so long against his innermost yearnings –– struck him as a kind of punishment akin to Truth taking his eyesight. He endured blindness and besottedness both as he came face to face with those feelings he had shelved for half a lifetime. Roy supposed he was long overdue for experiencing an obscure crisis of some kind.

The Flame Alchemist wondered, then, if love was too weak a word for what he felt for her, and gratitude, too insufficient.

There was a strange lightness to her voice when Riza murmured, gently: "I'm quite all right, sir."

The ache was in some place deeper than the torn muscle and tissue of his hands, deeper even than his bones. It stirred something sublime in his soul.

"What are you looking at, Colonel?" The low thrum of her voice vibrated straight through him.

He kept his eyes on where he imagined her face to be, whispering softly: "Nothing."

"You dropped your book, _sir_ ," grumbled Heymans, completely shattering the moment. He grunted as he bent at the knees to pick it up. "Would it've killed you to actually get your ass outta bed for once? Hell, _Jean_ moved around with more alacrity than you do. He planned a _coup_ and here you are with all the vibrancy of a dehydrated garden snail."

Breda had that peculiar, singularly bemusing ability to say an awful lot with an awful little... he was quite a lot like the stranger, in that respect. He bantered and cracked jokes in Jean's –– conspicuous –– absence, but Roy recognized a seed of truth at the heart of his close friend's acerbic wit.

 _Heymans misses him._

Terribly, desperately, and with every part of his being. That bitch of a homunculus hadn't just shattered a spine that night... she had broken two young hearts, as well. Jean's, who couldn't bear to hold on, and Heymans's, who couldn't bear to let go.

Of course, there was no way even someone of Breda's intelligence could have comprehended all that his friendship with Havoc would become. There were only a handful of times in Roy's own life when someone who would go on to change him forever walked into it –– two times exactly, in fact. Breda had found in Havoc, quite by accident, what Roy had found in Riza... and in poor, poor Maes: a person who would challenge him and shape him and make him feel like the world was safer and brighter just by being in it.

Life was an awful, lonely place to be without one's best friend. Roy knew that better than most.

But not eager to embarrass his Second Lieutenant, Roy leveled a half-serious glower in Breda's direction. "I need to give you something to do to keep you on your toes."

"Call me a goddamn ballerina then 'cause you're runnin' me ragged."

"Don't exaggerate, Heymans," chided Riza softly, but Roy could hear her small, sweet smile.

"And in any case," said Roy, enjoying the familiarity of taking the mickey with his staff, "didn't I ask you lot to bring me a change of my own clothes? I hear Falman setting down those new Ishvalan texts but I haven't heard a single shitty wooden hanger."

Vato let out a tiny squeak, and from the sound of the muttered curse a few moments later, he'd inadvertently dropped one of the tomes on his toe. Roy's lips spasmed, fighting a laugh.

Fuery giggled, which made Falman huff a breath of indignation. Roy could picture the man's sharp cheekbones going pink.

"I ain't your housekeeper," grumped Breda. "'Sides, you shouldn't worry your overinflated little head off, Boss. You still got it even in the hospital getup. It's downright criminal."

"Don't lie out of pity, Heymans. No one can look hot in these." A gleam of deviltry came to life in Roy's snuffed-out eyes. "Wait, are these the type of gowns that open in the back? In that case would you kindly get up and close the blinds so the Lieutenant and I can have some privacy?"

Roy felt something hit his arm, thrown with precision accuracy. The plastic clattered, sounding like a cheap compact mirror, as it ricochetted off Roy's bedsheets and hit the floor.

"I deserved that," he decided.

"You did, sir," agreed Riza demurely.

"Colonel," ventured Kain timidly, speaking up for the first time, cutting through whatever undoubtedly cheeky thing Roy was about to say, "may I ask you a strange question, sir?"

Roy smiled kindly. "Only if I can give you a strange answer, Fuery."

"What's that on your bed?"

"A bedsheet."

Roy heard Falman murmur a low, nettled, "Oh, honestly."

I'm blind, Vato, not deaf, the Flame Alchemist thought, exasperated. Besides, Fuery said he'd _wanted_ a strange answer...

"Oh _shit_."

Immediately, the tension in the room tightened until it threatened to snap, and Hawkeye went as taut as a harp string. Roy daren't think what the strain did to her stitches... "Lieutenant Breda," she snapped, "what's wrong? Do I need to call Ross––"

"Roy, how in the _hell_ did this get in here?"

"Beg your pardon, Lieutenant," interjected Falman, uncharacteristically agitated, "that's my book."

"Grumman's moldy bee-hind, it is! This belongs to the court martial office!"

Hawkeye's worry transmuted to ire as her subordinates continued to argue. Roy was usually –– albeit privately –– fond of the tint of rose high on her cheeks and the golden venom in her eyes, but he found in that moment that he was just as confused and irritated as she was. It was unlike Breda to bicker, and far more unlike Falman to disagree so belligerently.

"I think you'll find you're mistaken, sir. It was Private Sheska's, until she gifted it to me."

"You're b-both wrong," came a whisper from between them, part remorse, part accusation... part black dread.

Roy knew Falman and Breda had exchanged a concerned look by the way they had both grown ominously quiet. None of them had heard Kain Fuery quite so haggard and broken before.

After a moment during which Fuery's breath came in short, labored puffs, he stepped tentatively towards Roy's cot, as though breaking in a new pair of shoes. He stated, the words shining with anxiety and his voice loaded with confusion: "That's Noel's book, sir."

"Right," agreed Heymans –– a note of uneasiness in his usual sure, strong tenor. "From the Parrish case a few years back. The last I saw of it, it was with Maes, back before General Hakuro blackballed the entire investigation."

"The Court Martial Office must have acquired it after Noel..." Fuery tried to catch his breath, failed, and began to hiccough violently, "after he... the bridge..."

Roy sat still, something in his chest breaking. It was a small, clean sound, like the snapping of a flower's stem.

"Kain," said Riza, mildly, tenderly; Roy heard her arm hinge out to hold his youngest soldier gently but firmly by his shoulder, her touch alleviating some of the tension from the air, "is the book on the Colonel's bed the same book the jumper threw at you... and was the jumper the same man from Eastern Polytechnic?"

"Yes," mouthed Kain, voice hoarse, straining under the burden of the memory. "Noel Parrish is both alive and dead."

"That would mean you saw him die, Kain, before you encountered him at Eastern Polytechnic," concluded Roy, keeping a handle on his bemusement. "How is that possible?"

"It has something to do with this book, I imagine," prompted Riza.

"It seems to me," stated Falman in that sharp, almost surgical way of his. If Roy didn't know any better, he'd say the man was holding up fingers for emphasis... "that after the military police took the book from Sergeant Fuery, it made its way to the Court Martial Office, as a piece of evidence from a suicide. It eventually landed on Hughes's desk, where...?"

"The Brigadier-General and I discovered it contained an intricate code," finished Breda simply. "Alchemy notes, we figured, ciphered with a positional notation using a base-2 numeral system. Which would explain how Noel... I dunno, _superimposed_ himself. Why he seems to be everywhere, every _when_ , all at the same time."

"Why wasn't I informed?" demanded Roy. "I could have deciphered the notes... or Edward and Alphonse, for that matter. Any state alchemist."

"I told you, Boss... Hakuro closed us down. Forbade us from touching the Parrish case. Hughes promised to crack it open again once the lot of us were transferred to Central, but then Maes..."

Heymans left the obvious unsaid.

Roy's shoulders slumped, lashed by a sudden, rending grief, his hands fidgeting at his sheets. "What then?" he asked, quieter.

"Unclaimed and no longer relevant to any open cases," continued Falman, "an artifact such as a book would eventually find its way to a library... Central's First Branch."

"Which the Homunculi turned into charcoal," grumbled Heymans.

"But Sheska was the one charged with transcribing the materials lost in the fire," realized Fuery, brightening. "Since she was already working in the court martial office when the Brig–– when the library burnt down, Noel's book made its way to her!"

"And looking to clear a bit of the clutter," concluded Riza, familiar with the organized chaos of Sheska's belongings, "she gave the book to Falman as a going-away present when he was reassigned up North."

"Shortly before the Promised Day, I sold it to secondhand bookshop," admitted Vato, a mite guiltily. "I'd had an... unnerving conversation, up at Fort Briggs. I wanted to be shut of that book."

"That still doesn't answer how the damn thing made its way all the way down here from North City and landed itself on the Colonel's duvet," snapped Breda unsympathetically.

"Noel Parrish gave it to me."

It was uncanny, how Truth's meted out justice had done nothing to mitigate the potency of four stares turning to face him at once, nor cool the heat that emanated from a crowd's undivided attention.

"When was this, Colonel?" asked Riza sternly.

"About ten minutes ago."

Roy could almost hear Kain's jaw hinge open. " _Sir?!_ "

Hawkeye bristled, bunching the sheets in a fist until the fabric crunched. "I will have to have a quiet word with Ross about letting potentially dangerous alchemists into the Colonel's room in my absence."

"Don't blame Marie, Ri," protested Breda –– the Second Lieutenant was a mite soft on the young lady, Roy suspected. "Roy'd never met Parrish before, and Marie certainly hasn't. They weren't to know. 'Sides, all he did was drop off the book."

"Why, I wonder?" mused Falman.

"He told me," interjected the Flame Alchemist. "He said he... rather, _we..._ had been searching for the book for a long, long time. But once he found it, he realized the book... couldn't solve anything."

Riza hummed. "If the book contains coded alchemy notes as you say, Heymans, then it's likely Parrish was eager to consult his research for a way to undo whatever it was he did to himself."

"Only his book yielded nothing, and he dumped it on the Colonel without a by your leave. Why, huh? Why the Colonel?"

 _I suspect you are one who keeps his own secrets, and takes his punishment in silence._

Roy kept his mouth shut. Despite everything, the stranger –– Noel Parrish –– had judged him correctly. As the Colonel's head drifted slowly towards Riza's cot, where he visualized in his mind's eye her reclining against the headboard, her back –– _her scars_ –– pressed to the metal bars, and he realized he knew a thing or too about keeping secrets. A confession locked away not only from their absolvers, but from their would-be confessors, as well.

Perhaps Noel's book was one such confession. No one save the man –– and Mustang's Team –– knew about it. Perhaps Hughes had once known, but he had taken his knowledge with him to the grave. It was a useless mystery now, arcane and lonely, a relic because no one save its progenitor had thought to look for it, or even remember it. A secret staying undiscovered because it contained something too big for the mind to hold. Because it was too strange, too vast, too terrifying to contemplate.

 _Noel Parrish..._ mused Roy. Thinking about the man –– professor, physicist, alchemist –– threatened to take Flame's breath away, as though he had transmuted the oxygen in his own lungs. That one man should find the lot of them against such odds, through all the layers of armored fortifications each of them had set up, through all the endless partitions of space and infinite gradations of time. It was almost enough for Roy to believe in miracles. Noel, through some mechanism quite beyond Roy's reckoning, had folded his own history into some strange, modular origami, the shades of his past and future selves slipping back to the crucial moments to tap each of Team Mustang on the shoulders and whisper to them the secrets of the world.

It all felt superficially, random, but Roy didn't think it was. Perhaps randomness, like time, was an illusion, being simply the way the rest of them were able to perceive Noel's being after he had cloned himself into diverging alternate realities. Perhaps Noel Parrish had found a way to trace the invisible lines trembling in each of their wakes: Kain Fuery, Vato Falman, Heymans Breda, Jean Havoc, Maes Hughes, Riza Hawkeye... Roy Mustang... Parrish had outlined their trajectories through life, those courses throbbing with potential energy. Lines that sometimes crossed one other, or followed in parallel ellipses without ever touching, or intersected for one brief moment before pealing apart.

A universe of lines crisscrossing in the void. A vast transmutation circle, the vertices moments, the geometry time and space, chance and consequence, friendship and loneliness, life and death... loss and love...

"He can't have gotten far," Breda was saying, slapping the tiny volume against his thigh in agitation.

Falman piped up: "I shall take statements from the hospital staff."

Fuery elbowed in: "I'll radio the military police and circulate his description!"

Riza, as ever, deferred to him: "What are your orders, sir?"

But Roy just smiled faintly. A ghost of a gesture, but enough in Riza's case to cause her to take a deep, slow breath. He knew she held a mien of watchful kindness, a hint of a smile touching her own lips, and Roy cursed a God he didn't believe in that he could not see her face.

"You said Parrish's notes were coded as a children's fairytale, correct?"

"Yeah."

"Affirmative, Colonel."

"It sure seems that way, sir."

"Could you read it to me," asked Roy softly. "Not... not the alchemy. Just the story. Please."

Silence descended over the hospital room, distinctly cramped with five souls stuffed inside. But, a moment and a long, low, heartfelt sigh later, Heymans cleared his throat...

"One day in the long ago, T–Tay..." Breda huffed in frustration.

"Tāima," corrected Vato.

"Thanks," he grumbled. "Tāima... and her twin sister, Tuarangi, were laying on the grass outside the kōihi on a warm summer evening. They were looking up into the sky, describing star-pictures formed by their imaginations."

Fuery read over Breda's shoulder: " _My eyes are dazzled by all the stars in outer space_. For that is where your name comes from, Tuarangi."

"The love that moves the moon and all the stars," finished Falman, his voice whisper-soft.

Roy's catalyst for that fleeting, precious glimpse of the sublime had ceased to be science... or even alchemy.

No... without his eyesight... it was _them_. His team. Perhaps it always had been, but he had been too blind to see it.

Truth, he supposed, had done him a favor.

"The sisters gazed till they could see the earth no longer. _Our chord is cut..._ " For a moment, Heymans hesitated, swallowing; then, voice fraught with sadness and loneliness and longing for the one person he loved more than anything, he pressed on: " _A_ _nd our time is gone_ , they said: _w_ _e shall not find it again_. _.. we shall chase the dog stars, always, forever, into eternity..._ "

They had each other, marveled Roy Mustang, even after everything that had happened. Even after being separated, broken, burned, cast aside... their stories twisted and mingled like the strings bursting from the spine of an old book. They held each other tightly as they spun and lurched across their lives, across those moments of great suffering and sadness and loss... and redemption and joy and utter, bewildering, breathtaking magic.

With the most astounding things lying in wait as each day dawned, and each planet set, and each page turned.

 _Always, forever, into eternity..._

 **The** **End**


End file.
